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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26284816">Pawns</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/thingswithteeth/pseuds/thingswithteeth'>thingswithteeth</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Avatar: The Last Airbender</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/M, Fire Nation Politics (Avatar), Murder Mystery</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 07:20:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>34,493</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26284816</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/thingswithteeth/pseuds/thingswithteeth</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>In the months following the end of the war, Mai is forced to deal with a missing princess, a string of grisly murders, Fire Lord Zuko, and soiled diapers. At least it's not boring.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Mai/Zuko (Avatar)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>56</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>105</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I wrote the first thirty thousand words of this in 2007-08 under a now-defunct fanfiction.net account and before the series had ended. It's AU as of The Boiling Rock and when it was written The Search was but a gleam in Gene Yang's eye. It was always one of those fics that I kind of regretted not seeing through to the end, and no time like the present, right? The chapters that were already written have been edited for style but not for content, because I kind of wanted the challenge of finishing a story where I did <i>not</i> keep adequate notes about where I intended to go next.</p><p>Dedicated to everyone who hasn't given up on a fic they really loved being finished even after over a decade of radio silence, whatever fic that might've been, and a shout-out to that one ff.net reviewer who said they'd wait another twelve years for the end if they had to. Thanks for lighting a fire under my ass.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>               “Lady Mai.”</p><p>               There was a respectful hush to the guard’s voice. The anxiety on his face was well-hidden, as befit a soldier of the Fire Nation, but not well-hidden enough for Mai to miss it. The respectful address, the tense shoulders, those told her nothing. Perhaps he had been warned about her and was nervous about standing escort to a dangerous criminal. Perhaps he had been told that this trial business was nothing more than a formality, and was being careful not to offend a woman who would have the means to make his life very hard indeed, once freed of her shackles—metaphorical shackles, of course, since she had cooperated with her own arrest and no one had thought it necessary to restrain her with more than a locked door since.</p><p>               “Yes?”</p><p>               Bored neutrality had always come easiest to her, and in the days since the Fire Lord’s defeat she has permitted herself to show little else.</p><p>               “They’re ready for you.”</p><p>               She stood and allowed herself to be led from the room, far too comfortable to be called a cell, without protest or fuss, even though she was fairly sure that she could have made the guard bleed without too much effort, knives or no. She had once thought that life in Omashu was boring; it was <em>nothing</em> compared to a week spent alone in a room, with nothing to do but contemplate the walls.</p><p>               Well, not quite a week. They had led her out once before, to attend Ty Lee’s trial. Mai had found herself very nearly entertained as she watched the freshly crowned Fire Lord sweat his way through finding a suitable punishment for someone who had, even briefly, been a friend. Once, Mai might have felt some sympathy for his predicament, the needle point balance he had to strike between not wanting to be too harsh with Ty Lee and needing not to appear weak during his first stumbling steps as the ruler of a people who had always valued strength above mercy. Finally, Ty Lee, who Mai occasionally thought had glitter and fluff for brains but who was incapable of holding a grudge, had smiled brightly and suggested, with every intention of being helpful, that he banish her. Mai had no doubt that her friend had run off back to the circus the moment she had crossed out of Fire Nation waters.</p><p>               They passed the great double doors to the throne room, still hanging off their hinges after that final, devastating confrontation between the Fire Lord and the Avatar. Beyond it was a smaller door leading to the wing of the palace reserved for the royal family.</p><p>               There were signs of damage here as well. Mai carefully turned her head as they passed by what was left of the old nursery, happier not to think of her own part in that.</p><p>               Halfway down the hall they came to another door, with nothing to set it apart from any of the others: lacquered red wood with touches of gold ornamentation, expensive but not nearly as ostentatious as the parts of the palace meant for public consumption. The guard nodded stiffly to the servant posted outside before leading Mai past the door.</p><p>               General Iroh was seated directly to her left as she entered, in a chair facing the desk that dominated most of the room. He looked up from his tea only briefly, and Mai wasn’t quite sure how to take the smile he directed at her. She was fairly certain that she hadn’t done anything to warrant that kind of friendliness from him.</p><p>               Zuko – Fire Lord Zuko, now – sat on the far side of the desk, his head bent over a stack of papers. He didn’t look up at all when she entered.</p><p>               Standing near the large fireplace that took up most of one wall between the desk and the door was the Avatar. There was no fire lit, and the light streaming through the high-set windows cast deep shadows across his face, but she thought he was looking at her. She kept her gaze cool and level as she stared back at him, and had just turned away when Zuko raised his head from his work.</p><p>               “Mai,” he said, with a certain softness that reminded her of the note lying unread in her wardrobe, half-hidden under a crumpled pink robe that Ty Lee had sent her for her birthday two years earlier and which had been sitting unworn ever since. Then he cleared his throat, and his voice turned hard and formal. “Lady Mai. You have been acquitted of all charges against you. You are free to go.”</p><p>               The guard stepped away from her as if he had been burned.</p><p>               “Why?” Mai asked. It was a rational enough question. She had helped Azula in her hunt for the Avatar and had been instrumental in bringing proud Ba-Sing-Se to its knees. She had even played her part as a loyal daughter of the Fire Nation during that last, desperate battle against the Avatar.</p><p>               Zuko wasn’t going to answer. She knew well the look on his face, that particular mix of evasiveness and frustration that told her clearly that he didn’t want to say anything and just <em>could not</em> understand why she wasn’t cooperating. It was finally Iroh who spoke, after a brief pause while he blew on his tea to cool it. “You made certain choices during the Avatar’s final confrontation with the former Fire Lord which lead us to believe that you no longer have any intention of allying yourself with Princess Azula or her supporters.”</p><p>               Mai didn’t flinch, even as her fingertips tingled with the memory of a stiletto sent flying before she had even consciously decided who her target would be: brother, or sister?</p><p>               “Rather that punish you further for actions which are, after all, in the past, we have decided to release you.”</p><p>               The Avatar made a faint and not entirely approving noise, but after a moment he nodded philosophically. Mai barely saw it, her mind already busily turning over Iroh’s words.</p><p>               “I see,” she murmured. She wasn’t sure if she was relieved or disappointed. She decided that she was neither. She decided that she was bored. Politics had always bored her. “If you pardon a friend of Azula’s, then neither the generals under Ozai’s command nor the courtiers who supported his rule have any reason to fear immediate retribution. Even if they are plotting against you,” and they were almost certainly plotting; even under ideal circumstances, that was what they <em>did</em>, “they believe that they have time, and that buys you time.” And it was safe enough to make an example of her. She had already burned all the bridges that would have allowed her to oppose the new rule and had given them no indication that she would do so even if she had the means.</p><p>               Iroh offered no confirmation, but he also offered no denial. Instead he smiled serenely at her and returned to his tea, as though there was any chance she would believe the senile old man routine even for a moment. She waited, but eventually it became clear that Iroh’s smiling silence was the only dismissal she was likely to receive. The part of her that was her mother’s daughter balked at the idea of leaving the Fire Lord’s presence without his permission, but that part was much quieter than Mai’s intense desire to no longer be in this room and the foolish but difficult to shake conviction that the Fire Lord was <em>just Zuko</em>, just her friend’s brother and her—.</p><p>               Not her anything, but still unlikely to take offense because she left a room.</p><p>               Mai prepared to go.</p><p>               Zuko’s voice stopped her.</p><p>               “What did she say to you?”</p><p>               No need to clarify who he meant. Half-bent in an exiting bow, Mai allowed herself to close her eyes and remember how close Azula had stood to deliver that parting shot, their faces almost touching, her breath hot enough on Mai’s cheek that Mai had checked the skin in a mirror after, just to see if her skin had scalded red. Of course Zuko hadn’t heard.</p><p>               “She told me that I had made my bed,” Mai replied, her voice steady, “and that she would burn me in it.” She paused, and for accuracy’s sake she added, “Then she laughed.”</p><p>               Zuko did not immediately respond.</p><p>               “Azula always lies,” he said eventually, and Mai thought that he intended for it to be reassuring, even though the words had the cadence of an old mantra, repeated to the point where it had lost all meaning.</p><p>               She was in the presence of the new Fire Lord, and that still wasn’t enough to keep her from sighing at Zuko, exasperated. A lifetime’s worth of study, and he still didn’t understand his sister. “Azula only lies when she has a reason to.” She straightened from her bow. “Sometimes, the truth suits her better.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>               “Lady Mai.”</p><p>               “Come in, Lee,” she said, without looking away from the window. The mellow light of the sun made the land look soft and golden through the glass, tinting even the red-tiled rooftops of the distant farmsteads with yellow and casting deep shadows beneath their eaves. Hardly exciting, but she could admit, objectively, that her father’s study had a view unrivaled by any other room in the house.</p><p>               Her father’s study. Her study, now.</p><p>               She heard the uneven rasp of Lee’s footsteps as he approached her desk. He had walked with a pronounced limp for as long as she had known him, and she had known him almost all her life. She had never been quite sure how he had earned that limp, although she had heard at least a dozen contradictory stories about it. A street brawl. A war injury. A rampant komodo rhino. An angry husband.</p><p>               When the thump-scrape of his footsteps halted, she finally turned to look at him. Like the limp, his appearance hadn’t changed in all the years that she had known him: tall, with the kind of gangling long limbs that didn’t look well-suited for the controlled grace with which she knew that he could move, black hair graying at the temples, laugh lines dredged deep around his mouth and eyes. Really, he looked like any former soldier of middle years, if a bit more good-natured than most. Of course, she had no guarantee that he had ever been a soldier and, no matter how free he was with a smile, he could turn deadly in an instant. It had been Lee who had taught her how to drop a man twice her size at fifty paces with a knife the length of her middle finger.</p><p>               Some people actually <em>listened</em> to her when she told them she was bored.</p><p>               Mai had actually been a little sorry to see him go when her family had moved to Omashu. He had worked for her family since she was in diapers, and it had seemed like a foregone conclusion that he would go with them, but when he had been told that her father had been offered governorship over the city he had smiled and said that the Earth Kingdom air was hard on his health. She hadn’t seen him or heard from him since their departure, not until she had received a note in his hideous and familiar scrawl the day before to request this meeting.</p><p>               “You wished to speak to me?” she asked, prompted by the memory.</p><p>               “I wanted to offer my condolences,” he said.</p><p>               “They are appreciated,” Mai said. The words came easily, with all the practice she had gotten recently at saying them. Easily, but not sincerely. It was surprisingly hard to play the dutiful daughter in mourning when she wasn’t sure how much grief she really felt, and when she had always been taught not to show what grief she <em>did</em> feel. “It would seem that you were right not to come with us to Omashu.”</p><p>               He shrugged a shoulder. “That wasn’t why I stayed behind, but you’re not wrong. I hear the riots in Omashu have been some of the worst.”</p><p>               “King Bumi seems to have it under control now.”</p><p>               “Not soon enough from where you’re standing, I’d hazard to guess.”</p><p>               “It is what it is,” Mai said, quietly. “I understand why they did it. No one likes to be controlled.” It was a terrible thing to say, but Lee was in no position to judge her—and also didn’t look inclined to pass judgment, in any case. There was some relief in saying something terrible, or just anything that wasn’t the dull recitation of perfectly appropriate grief. She sat, and motioned for Lee to do the same. “I still have one member of my family left, at least.”</p><p>               “Your brother.”</p><p>               “King Bumi was kind enough to agree to ransom him back to me,” Mai said, and reigned herself in quickly when she heard the edge to her words, sharp as the stilettos she kept up her sleeves. “The Fire Lord has appointed someone to oversee the transaction. I expect Tom-Tom to arrive within the week.”</p><p>               “I’m glad to hear it.”</p><p>               “You didn’t come just to comfort an old student.” It wasn’t a question, but her voice was once again calm and controlled.</p><p>               “That’s true,” Lee agreed amiably. “I thought you might have work for an old dog like me.”</p><p>               Mai raised an eyebrow. “Doing what? Whipping young guards into shape? You must not have heard. None of the noble houses are allowed to keep private militias or garrison members of the national army anymore. That was part of the treaty with the Earth Kingdom and Water Tribes: a greatly reduced military under central control, with future allowances made for a constabulary force intended to keep the peace.” Boring. Like regurgitating lessons about the reign of Fire Lord Zoryu when she and Ty Lee and Azula had been in school, with the only difference being that this particularly dry piece of history was a bit more current.</p><p>               “Oh no,” Lee said, with a touch of wry humor. “I’d hoped against hope, but now I see that my gravest worries for you have come to pass. You <em>are </em>a politician’s daughter.”</p><p><em>               What else was I supposed to be? </em>Mai almost asked, but she was suddenly tired of the conversation, so she answered him only with a sigh. “Whatever. If you want a position, you can have it. I’ll find something for you to do.” She cast a glance at the messy pile of sealed scrolls that littered the top of her father’s desk. “If nothing else, I suppose I could have you answer condolence letters.”</p><p>               A wolfish grin was his response. “No, thanks. Paperwork makes me break out in hives.”</p><p>               There were distinct disadvantages to hiring someone who had seen her in nappies, Mai reflected. She would be getting no properly deferential treatment from Lee. She regretted her decision already.</p><p>               “Besides,” he continued, undaunted, “I have no time to answer letters. I need to make sure that my favorite student hasn’t gone soft since last I saw her.”</p><p>               Mai almost smiled at that, and took it as the challenge that it was intended to be. Letting her old teacher try her skills would be something interesting to do, for a while at least. She motioned him out the door, and let him lead the way to the training ground next to what had once been a barracks. The building had housed her father’s small private militia and a company of Fire Nation soldiers. Now it lay empty, the militia gone to Omashu, the army disbanded, and her own skeleton crew of house servants completely disinterested in a relic of the too-recent past, even though most of them had brothers or sisters or children who had been soldiers.</p><p>               An hour later she returned to the house, arms and legs aching pleasantly with exertion, fine strands of hair plastered to her forehead. Her mother would have had a fit, but it reminded her more of Azula than of her mother. Azula, who could practice her bending for hours and still look cool and perfect at the end of it, even when they had been children.</p><p>
  <em>               “You’ve made your bed, Mai. Now I’m going to burn you in it.”</em>
</p><p>               She hadn’t looked cool and perfect then. She had been sweat- and soot-stained from her fight with Zuko, her clothing torn, her hair disheveled. There had been blood barely visible against the bright red of her tunic, blood that dyed her sleeve a darker crimson from wrist to elbow, blood from where Mai had—.</p><p>               A thin, painfully plain girl that her housekeeper had hired the week before as a maid approached Mai, snapping her out of her reverie. The direction that her mind had been turning wasn’t the girl’s fault, but Mai stared her down anyway, and paid for it when nerves rendered the poor creature unable to speak for several more seconds.</p><p><em>               Honestly</em>.</p><p>               Finally, she managed to stutter out that there was someone waiting for Mai in the study.</p><p>               “Who?” Mai asked, losing interest already. Another one of her father’s political rivals or her mother’s social rivals come to gloat politely under the guise of shared sorrow, no doubt.</p><p>               The maid looked up, her plain little face practically glowing as she said, in tones of muted awe, “The Dragon of the West.”</p><p>               She was going to fire the little twit at the earliest possible opportunity, Mai decided.</p><p>               “Send him in some tea,” she said. “I’ll join him shortly.”</p><p>               After retreating back to her rooms, she took her time changing clothes, washing her face, and brushing her hair. It wasn’t dislike that made her take her time in going down to greet the former general, nor was it disinterest. In the month and a half since she had been acquitted and left the capital she had heard no word from either Zuko or from anyone connected to him, except in the official capacity, when she had been brought news of her parents’ death and been asked to raise the money for Tom-Tom’s ransom. She wasn’t sure why that would change now, wasn’t sure why the Fire Lord’s most trusted advisor would be traveling days from the capital to see her at her family’s admittedly isolated estate.</p><p>               When she finally trekked back into the study, she found another surprise waiting for her.</p><p>               “You brought my brother,” Mai said, unable to think of anything else to say.</p><p>               Iroh smiled genially and bounced a drooling Tom-Tom on his knee. “Yes.” The smile wilted a little. “Didn’t you get the letter I sent you?”</p><p>               Mai kept her face carefully neutral.</p><p>               “I sent it a week ago, to tell you when I would arrive with your brother.”</p><p>               She tried not to let her eyes shift to the pile of deliberately unopened scrolls sitting on the desk.</p><p>               “By private messenger hawk?”</p><p>               And failed.</p><p>               Iroh tracked her gaze and sighed. “I hope that you at least got the official notice of your brother’s return.” He used one hand to balance her baby brother, who giggled, and reached for the cup of tea that had been left of the edge of the desk.</p><p>               “I did,” Mai said, circling the desk to take her own chair across from him. “I’ll have to take more care with my correspondence, and separate the deathly boring from the remotely interesting in the future. My apologies, General Iroh.”</p><p>               She stared as the toddler in his lap reached up to grab at Iroh’s beard. Tom-Tom was <em>still</em> drooling, she noted, with mild fascination and more than a little disgust.</p><p>               “Uncle.”</p><p>               “What?”</p><p>               “Call me Uncle Iroh,” he said. He said it easily, as if nothing pleased him more than the thought of her establishing some sort of deranged extended family connection to him.</p><p>               Azula was right. Her uncle was cracked.</p><p>               More disturbing was the thought that, because of her past connections to both of his brother’s children, they probably <em>did</em> have some sort of deranged extended family connection.</p><p>               Tom-Tom let loose a squeal of delight when he finally managed to wrap his chubby little fingers around Iroh’s beard. Then he yanked. Hard. Mai gave Zuko’s uncle credit where it was due: he barely flinched. He just shifted the toddler so that his beard was no longer within easy reach and began bouncing his knee again. The disruption, brief though it was, gave Mai a chance to think. There was something not quite right about this whole arrangement.</p><p>               Some kind of political maneuver, she finally decided. She wasn’t sure what Iroh expected to gain by personally delivering Tom-Tom to her door, but it was still a sound guess. His nephew was a newly-crowned Fire Lord who had ended a hundred-year war and Mai remained as unconvinced by the senile old man routine as she had been standing in Zuko’s office months earlier; Iroh wouldn’t be here without cause.</p><p>               “It’s quite an honor to have you escort my brother home,” she said, not even trying to keep the flatness out of her voice. “I’m curious as to why you decided to take several days away from what I’m sure is an exceptionally exciting life of drinking tea and playing pai sho in order to bestow that honor.”</p><p>               “I wouldn’t call it time away,” Iroh said contemplatively. “This is some excellent jasmine tea that you are serving.” He took another sip, as if to prove it.</p><p>               The thin veneer of her mother’s manners, already imperfectly maintained, cracked. “Why are you here?”</p><p>               “To return your brother.”</p><p>               “And?”</p><p>               Mai wasn’t going to win a staring contest with the infamous Dragon of the West. More to the point, she wasn’t going to win a staring contest with Azula’s notoriously unflappable Uncle Iroh. She did try, however, and Iroh was courteous enough to relent after a few scant seconds, leaving her with her dignity intact. “There is something.” He said it slowly, as if he was choosing his words with care “Something which the Fire Lord needs done, but cannot do himself. I – and Zuko – believe that you might be the right person for the task, if you are willing.”</p><p>               Mai was careful, so careful, to keep her face blank, but she was thinking. She could tell Iroh <em>no</em>. She <em>should</em> tell him no. She had survived a regime change with her life and with her family fortune intact; it was a victory that even her father would have been hard-pressed to replicate. For all of that, she lacked her father’s ambition. She aimed for no seat higher than the one she was sitting in now, and there was nothing to be gained by currying favor with the man sitting across from her. Even her father would have approved of moving forward only cautiously, because there was a great deal to lose by allowing herself to become entangled with these <em>people</em> again.</p><p>               She would tell Iroh <em>no</em>.</p><p>               The days ahead of her stretched out, long and interminable, spent replying to condolence letters and going over accounts and firing poor, mousy little maids just to break up the monotony. All the quiet, polite, politic things that her parents had raised her to do, but why was she doing them now? Who did she have to please; whose career did she have to further?</p><p>               “Yes.”</p><p>               For just a moment, she remembered when Azula had come to her in Omashu with a similar proposition. She had agreed, impetuously and for much the same reason, without even bothering to wonder—.</p><p>               “Don’t you want to know what you’re being asked to do?”</p><p>               Had Azula asked her that? Mai couldn’t remember. She shrugged and waved a hand through the air to indicate that he should continue.</p><p>               “You remember Princess Ursa.”</p><p>               It wasn’t really a question, but she nodded anyway. She remembered Princess Ursa in the same vivid way that she remembered the rest of her childhood visits to the palace as Azula’s particular friend. Those days had been a bright spot in her otherwise dull young life. Ursa had been tall, and beautiful, and much kinder than Mai had expected after becoming acquainted with her daughter. Azula had never much liked her mother, just as she had never liked Iroh, but Mai—Mai hadn’t minded her.</p><p>               “There is reason to believe that Ursa is still alive and that she was banished shortly after the death of my father, Fire Lord Azulon. With the war over, Zuko would very much like to locate her.”</p><p>               Something which the Fire Lord needed done, but couldn’t do himself.</p><p>               “He would like you to go try to find her. Quietly.”</p><p>               “I can understand not having the Fire Lord go off to looking for her, but why me? Why keep it quiet, rather than going through official channels?”</p><p>               Iroh looked at her seriously, although he continued to bounce her brother gently. Tom-Tom underscored their conversation with soft, happy baby babble. “There are still many scars left from the war. It will take time to build trust between the nations again, lifetimes even. Our ambassadors and diplomats have had to work hard to gain what acceptance they have from the Earth Kingdom and Water Tribes; to send in a large search party might damage what they have achieved. You are talented, you know the Earth Kingdom, and I believe that you can be trusted. Others are looking as well, friends from Zuko’s time with the Avatar, but they have their own duties and concerns which they need to attend to, and the interests of their own nations to look after. You would be able to dedicate you time to the search in a way they cannot. As for why we would prefer to keep the search quiet—well. As I’m sure you can imagine, my nephew has enemies, and there are always opportunists who would use a man’s family against him.” He looked down at Tom-Tom, a subtle reminder that Mai had been in the position of having a family member held for ransom not once, but twice. She liked to think that she had handled it better, this time. She had barely even considered allowing the Earth Kingdom to keep her brother. “Better that no one know that Princess Ursa still lives until we have her safely home.”</p><p>               Mai turned that over in her mind, unable to help but feel that she was missing something but equally unable to pinpoint what it was. If she was honest, she didn’t entirely care what Iroh was leaving out. This sounded significantly more exciting than managing her family’s estate and cleaning up after a toddler. “That sounds reasonable.” Already something was heating in her blood, filling her with a touch of the same sizzling excitement that she felt in the middle of a fight.</p><p>               “Come to the palace,” Iroh encouraged her. “It would be best to start the search from the place where the princess was last seen.”</p><p>               That pulled her up short, her enthusiasm sputtering out like a fire doused suddenly with cold water. “Tell me something, Uncle.” He couldn’t miss the irony in that last word.</p><p>               He had the sense to look wary. “Yes?”</p><p>               “How <em>is</em> our brave young Fire Lord?”</p><p>               It was a stupid, stupid moment of weakness to want to know, of course. It wasn’t even the question she had meant to ask. At least the words she had chosen and the tone that had gone with them were harder and stronger than whatever momentary idiocy had prompted her to ask in the first place; even to her own ears, she didn’t particularly sound like she cared what, who, or how Zuko was doing.</p><p>               “He is… adjusting.”</p><p>               Such a careful answer, Mai thought. She nodded once and let her eyes wander back to one of the large windows that dominated the otherwise bare walls of the study. It had grown dark outside, the sun’s light having faded in favor of the cool kiss of the moon. “I wasn’t sure. It takes a while for the gossip to reach us, this far out.”</p><p>               Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Iroh stop bouncing Tom-Tom, and she heard clearly enough her brother’s mewling sound of protest. “You don’t have to explain to me, Mai,” he said, his voice placating and knowing enough to tickle her with irritation. “Are you angry because you’ve heard nothing from him since he assumed the throne? He’s had a lot on his mind. Ruling a country in turmoil is no easy task. He barely takes time to eat or sleep, much less to write to friends.”</p><p>               “I’m not angry,” Mai said, turning back to Iroh. She had made an eleventh hour defection to the Avatar’s side of the war, and the Fire Lord had pardoned her for all the hours that had proceeded it. He owed her nothing. “And I’m not a friend.” Maybe once, but not now.</p><p>               The suddenness of Iroh’s smile surprised her. “Really? That’s too bad. I’m afraid he doesn’t have many these days. Less than he needs.”</p><p>               Was there a warning in that? How bad <em>were</em> things at the palace?</p><p>               It seemed that she would find out soon enough.</p><p>               “Would you like to stay the night?” Mai asked.</p><p>               “Thank you, yes,” Iroh said, rising with Tom-Tom still cradled in his arms. “My bones are getting old, and they don’t like to travel as much as they used to.” When she started to stand, he waved her back into her seat. “Don’t trouble yourself, please. I’ll ask someone to show me where to go.” Without another word, and without giving her a chance to reply, he plopped Tom-Tom into her lap and left the study with a speed that belied his old bones.</p><p>               She looked down at her brother. He had stopped drooling, but flaky white trails of dried spit had formed in streaks down his chin. He met her gaze, his own eyes dark and impossibly wide.</p><p>               Then he began to cry.</p><p>               Mai sighed.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>               “I’m sorry my uncle isn’t here to say goodbye,” Zuko said, taking a seat next to Toph at the edge of the turtleduck pond.</p><p>               “Eh, don’t worry about it.” She stretched her legs out until her bare feet almost touched the water. “I’m leaving now that you have an official delegate from the Earth Kingdom, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t come back and visit. You know, if my parents don’t lock me in my room until I’m thirty.”</p><p>               The odds of anyone being able to cage Toph if she didn’t want to be caged were so slim as to be nonexistent. He still found himself saying, “Even if they do, we’ll break you out.”</p><p>               Toph made a very rude sound, but he could see the hint of the smile curling her lips. “Just like old times. Nah. You have enough on your plate.”</p><p>               That was undeniably true. Anger, never far from the surface these days, simmered for a moment before Toph’s presence and the familiar surroundings of his mother’s garden soothed him.</p><p>               “That bad?”</p><p>               He hadn’t said anything, but of course Toph would know. He wondered what subtle clues of tensing muscles and shifting heartbeat his body had given over to the ground beneath him.</p><p>               “Worse.” It was nice not to have to deal in subterfuge. He would miss that freedom after Toph was gone, when the only person left to confide in would be his uncle.</p><p>               “They still at it?” she wondered, not without her own rough brand of sympathy. After all, she had experienced what was happening firsthand, having stayed on as the unofficial representative of the Earth Kingdom in the months since he had claimed his throne. “I caught some of this morning’s meeting. You have good ideas, Zuko. I don’t know why those idiots are going out of their way to try to trip you up.”</p><p>               “Spite. Most of them were Ozai’s pets.”</p><p>               “So get rid of ‘em,” Toph said, as if it was as simple as that.</p><p>               Maybe it was, but removing his councilors would cause a whole new set of problems. Fire Lord or not, he couldn’t directly oversee everything that had to do with ruling the nation. He, like every Fire Lord before him, was forced to delegate control over certain aspects of government. <em>Replacing</em> the most troublesome of his subordinates should have been an option, but finding people both qualified and loyal to take over was difficult, and the web of alliance and marriage and favors owed between the members of his court was impossible to track, especially after such a long time away. If he rooted out one enemy, it was entirely possible that he’d be leaving two or three more at his back, their ire stoked by seeing a friend removed from a coveted position. Supposedly, their anger shouldn’t matter. He was the Fire Lord, and he didn’t need the permission of the Lord of Ports in order to impose a new tax on luxury goods shipped from the Earth Kingdom. But it was the Lord of Ports who would enforce that tax—or decide not to.</p><p>               When he didn’t respond, Toph shrugged and lay back against the ground. “Your uncle told me about your mother.”</p><p>               “Of course he did,” Zuko muttered. It was a conversation he had meant to have with Toph before she returned to the Earth Kingdom. Even if she couldn’t see, she was one of the most observant people he knew. If anyone could find something – <em>someone </em>– just by paying attention to her surroundings and keeping an ear open, it was Toph. </p><p>               “I’ll poke around when I get home,” she promised, without him having to ask. “I think I’d like to meet Mama Firecracker.”</p><p>               The use of the familiar but not exactly beloved nickname made him sigh, but protesting was more-or-less begging her to use it more often. “I appreciate it,” he said, a little stiffly. Even now, even with friends, <em>thank you</em> didn’t come easy to his lips.</p><p>               “Don’t mention it.” Toph scrubbed one callused heel against the dirt. “Why’d you decide to start looking?”</p><p>               No point in lying, even if he had wanted to. “I received a death threat.”</p><p>               “For you?” She sounded confused, and he didn’t blame her. Since he had taken the throne, the occasional death threat had become routine.</p><p>               “For my mother.”</p><p>               Toph frowned. “If <em>you</em> don’t know where she is, how would anyone else be able to find her?”</p><p>               “They might not have,” he said shortly. “It might only be an attempt to distract me, but I won’t risk it.”</p><p>               “You’re going to go see your sister.”</p><p>               “How do you know that?”</p><p>               She laughed, as if she could see the befuddled look on his face. “Something’s gone wrong. Even odds that Azula is behind it, right?”</p><p>               “That,” should have been impossible, since his sister was still imprisoned, “is probably true.”</p><p>               A twist of her foot, and Toph was on her feet, the ground beneath her having pushed her upright. The turtleducks squawked with alarm at the sudden earthbending, their short wings beating against the water at the center of the pond. Toph ignored them. “I’ll walk you there.”</p><p>               He was the Fire Lord. He ruled his nation with a firm but merciful hand, in spite of his councilors’ attempts to sabotage him. He had taught the Avatar firebending and helped to end a hundred-year-old war. He <em>still</em> knew that arguing with Toph was like bailing water from the sea, or any of this uncle’s other proverbs about useless occupations. Since any protests from him were likely to go as ignored as the turtleducks, Zuko simply stood and led the way.</p><p>               Not that Toph needed to led to his sister’s prison. She had built it, after all. It was on the palace grounds, a tall tower close enough to the family quarters that he could see it through the windows of his study. It might have been foolishness to keep Azula so close, but Zuko preferred it to locking her away in some distant location. At least here, he could keep an eye on her.</p><p>               The tower was made from the same dark volcanic rock as everything else, but still looked more organic than anything build by Fire Nation hands, with no seam to show where the tower's foundation ended and the bare earth surrounding it began. It loomed over the surrounding buildings, and Zuko wondered briefly what had prompted him to have it built so close to Mai’s family townhouse. Clear space, he decided, and the vantage point from his study.</p><p>               A bored earthbender stood with one massive shoulder propped against the wall of the tower. He straightened up when they approached. Zuko had the feeling that his sudden attentiveness had more to do with respect for Toph than respect for the Fire Lord.</p><p>               “<em>The Boulder</em> heard that you were leaving.”</p><p>               The man seemed nervous. Maybe it had more to do with <em>fear</em> of Toph than respect for her. Zuko had heard that she had exchanged some choice words with her fellow earthbenders when convincing some of them to stay behind in the Fire Nation and help guard the former princess.</p><p>               “The ship will wait,” Toph said offhandedly. She stomped her little foot, and the earth nearest to the tower rose up, forcing <em>the Boulder</em> (what kind of a stupid name was that?) to scramble out of the way. A staircase formed, winding its way up the smooth side of the tower until it came to a stop beneath the iron-barred door at the very top. Toph turned back to Zuko. “The Boulder will bring it down when you’re done.”</p><p>               Zuko stood awkwardly, wondering how he was supposed to say goodbye to someone who had been a staunch ally and a constant companion for almost a year. He was saved from having to come up with something when Toph snorted, slugged him in the arm hard enough that he knew he’d have a bruise to remember her by the next day, and stomped off with a parting, “See you later, Firecracker.”</p><p>               He turned and looked at the Boulder. The Boulder looked back. “<em>The Boulder</em> is no longer worried about admitting that he is afraid of a little girl. <em>The Boulder</em> is secure in his masculinity.”</p><p>               Zuko cleared his throat, decided that no response was actually needed, and started his trek up the stairs.</p><p>               He peered through the metal bars on the door. There was a single window set in the opposite wall, and he could see Azula silhouetted against it, could see the set of her shoulders and the unbent line of her spine. Even with the light streaming in from outside, the room was dark. Azula was not allowed candles. Her bending had been blocked, but there was still the chance that she could manipulate an existing flame using her breath alone.</p><p>               She stepped closer to the door when she saw him. The bars cast shadows across her face, but he could still make out the slight, mocking curve of her lips. “Hello, Zuzu.”</p><p>               He didn’t respond, simply reached into one of the deep, hidden pockets in his robe of office and pulled out the neatly folded piece of parchment. He had woken up one morning to find it sitting on his dressing table, which had been empty of even that much clutter when he had tumbled into bed mere hours before. Without a word, he handed it to her.</p><p>               Azula took the note with her left hand. Her right hand dangled uselessly by her side. Zuko felt a hideous sort of satisfaction as he watched her struggle to unfold the note one-handed, but Azula seemed unfazed. She skimmed the characters written there with apparent amusement. “You think I sent this?”</p><p>               “Yes.”</p><p>               She laughed and pinched the note shut between her fingers. “Oh, Zuzu. It’s always nice when to come by to entertain me. Being in prison can be dreadfully dull.” The laughter faded as abruptly as it had started, although a smirk still lingered at the corners of her mouth. “Why would <em>I</em> threaten to kill our mother?”</p><p>               “It wouldn’t be the first time you tried to kill a family member,” he reminded her, his voice tight.</p><p>               She leaned forward and the smile turned deadly. “I never succeeded.” She tilted her head, thoughtful. “Then again, neither did you. You got the <em>Avatar</em> to do your dirty work with father.” She raised the hand holding the note out in front of her, and Zuko had the feeling that, had she been able to, she would have set it aflame. “And I still seem to be among the living.”</p><p>               “Just answer the question, Azula.” He did not play games with his sister. Too often he lost.</p><p>               “I have no intention of killing mother. Does that satisfy you? What would killing her gain me?" She flicked a lock of hair out of her face. "I mean, yes, it would probably make you cry, but really. I’m in prison. If I’m to reach beyond the walls of this charming little cell you gave me, there are things more worthy of my time.”</p><p>               It was impossible to miss the threat in her words. Even in prison, denied visitors, Azula had influence.</p><p>               “As for doing the deed myself—.” she laughed. “I don’t know how you would expect me to accomplish such a feat. I mean, I’m touched by your confidence in my abilities, but do you really expect me to break through the door, scale seventy feet of mirror-smooth wall, and destroy whatever guards you have posted, all without being able to firebend?” She flicked the note at him through the bars, hitting him in the forehead. “Or had you forgotten that? It’s amazing what a capable physician with a set of needles and knowledge of the pressure points can do, isn’t it? No, you needn’t worry about me hurting a hair on mother’s head. I’m as harmless as a baby koala-cat.”</p><p>               For a moment, they looked at each other through the bars, both of them well aware that Azula hadn’t been harmless a day in her life.</p><p>               “Well?” Azula said, when the silence stretched and grew. “Aren’t you happy? You’ve won. I’ve lost. Father was wrong.” She sounded so pleasant, as if she was asking him if he’d enjoyed breakfast that morning or commenting on the unseasonably warm weather. “So maybe I haven’t accepted things as they are. Maybe I’m still plotting against you. There isn’t much I can <em>do</em> about it, is there?”</p><p>               “And you’ll keep plotting,” Zuko said, his voice hard.</p><p>               “Oh, yes,” she agreed immediately. “As long as you let me live, you’ll be waiting for my next little surprise. It’s your own fault, really. What did you expect me to do? I wait, and I plot. That’s what a Fire Lord in prison <em>does</em>.”</p><p>               “You were never Fire Lord.”</p><p>               “I was father’s heir,” she said. “I wonder what that makes you. A usurper, I suppose. I rather like the sound of that. Zuko the Usurper. Perhaps that’s what I’ll have you called in the history books, once I have what’s rightfully mine.”</p><p>               “No, Azula,” he said. “You will never leave here.”</p><p>               For a moment she looked surprised, as if she hadn’t expected that from him. Then her expression changed, and he wondered if it was his imagination or the uncertain light that made her look as though she was gloating. “No? Well, maybe not.”</p><p>               “If I find out that you had anything to do with this,” Zuko said, stooping to pick up the note without taking his eyes off her, “I will have the earthbenders take down the tower. With you in it.”</p><p>               “So serious.” Azula said, completely unconcerned by his threat. “You couldn’t kill me six months ago. Why should I believe you would be able to do it now?”</p><p>               “Try me.”</p><p>               He left before she could answer.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>               Tom-Tom had cried for most of the journey. He had also cried for the two nights preceding their departure, after Iroh had left to return to the capital.</p><p>               Predictably, Tom-Tom started to smile and coo the moment that Iroh greeted them, as if he was a perfectly normal, not-entirely-repulsive baby, instead of being a fiend sent to torment her for all of her past wrongdoing.</p><p>               “Poor little one,” Iroh said, scooping her delighted brother out of her arms. “Cranky from the trip, are we?”</p><p>               Mai wasn’t sure how the former general could tell without any verbal input from Tom-Tom that her brother was cranky from the long hours of travel, instead of hungry, soiled, or simply intent on expressing his opinion on the insufficient allocation of tax money for the maintenance of Fire Nation roads.</p><p>               She thought she heard a snicker behind her. She pointedly did not look at Lee.</p><p>               “I’ve set up rooms for you within the palace,” Iroh said, his mind turning swiftly to business. “Since there is no telling how long you will wish to remain, I thought it best that you not have to open up your family’s townhouse, nor arrange for servants or provisioning.”</p><p>               Mai thought of Zuko, and almost protested being housed in the palace. Being in close quarters seemed like an open invitation for discomfort, as well as fodder for those among the court gossips who had memories that stretched back more than a few months (not many of them, it was true, but enough). Then she thought of Azula’s tower, which stood close enough to the house that it blocked the view from several of the westerly windows, and nodded her acquiescence. Having set things up to her liking seemed to please Iroh, at least.</p><p>               “You should probably arrange for a nurse for this one,” he suggested, rooting around in his pocket for a moment before offering the now-docile Tom-Tom a piece of ginger candy.</p><p>               Mai cast a look at the toddler and shrugged. “I brought a maid,” she said. The little mousy one, who had escaped firing because Mai had more important things to worry about. “She should be able to manage watching him.”</p><p>               The look on Iroh’s face said that he wanted to argue, but he just nodded. “You know what’s best,” he said. <em>You really don’t</em>, his tone said.</p><p>               He cuddled Tom-Tom a little closer to his chest and looked behind her, his eyes resting on Lee. She got the distinct impression that the old man was doing a double-take.</p><p>               “It has been a while,” the Dragon of the West said.</p><p>               Lee raised his eyebrows. Iroh smiled.</p><p>               “Perhaps you will play a game of pai sho with me while you are here?”</p><p>               “You cheat.”</p><p>               Iroh tched like a maiden aunt. “A Master never cheats.” He waited, looking at Lee expectantly.</p><p>               Lee sighed and looked down. Then he looked at Iroh and, obviously begrudging each word, said, “The White Lotus opens wide to those who know her secrets.”</p><p>               Mai wasn’t even going to try to decipher that conversation. There were certain things she just <em>did not</em> want to know about old men and their predilections, and this very much sounded like one of them.</p><p>               Somehow, though, she wasn’t surprised when Lee fell into step next to Iroh on the way to her newly appointed rooms. She couldn’t hear much of what they said, for which she was profoundly grateful, although she did catch Lee’s vehemently muttered “—<em>ridiculous</em>.”</p><p>               Iroh chuckled and replied, “The cryptic arts most often are, yes.” Then their voices fell back into quiet murmurs, and she was left to follow them without having to worry about either the annoyance of a weeping toddler or the threat of overhearing something that would require a lightning strike from Azula to erase it from her mind.</p><p>               The rooms that Iroh took them to were sumptuous, located in a part of the palace designated for visiting diplomats and those rare members of the nobility who were important enough to be housed in close proximity to the royal family, but who didn’t have houses of their own either on the palace grounds or in the surrounding city. Mai stepped into the outer room of what appeared to be a large suite and trailed her fingers over the rich red fabric that covered one low couches. Lee took one look around, shrugged, and made some excuse about having friends to visit in the barracks before disappearing, his limping footsteps surprisingly silent against the hard, glossy floors.</p><p>               Their surroundings just seemed to make her maid uneasy. When Iroh set the toddler down to explore his new surroundings the woman followed after him attentively enough, but she kept casting nervous glances about her, as if she thought that one of the fine, heavy pieces of furniture was going to attack at any moment.</p><p>               Mai made a disparaging noise. Iroh gave her a reproachful look, a sure sign that he did not approve of attempts to make the staff jump. Usually she would have resented the attempt to curtail even so mild a form of amusement, but she didn’t doubt that she would have more than enough to keep her occupied now that she had arrived.</p><p>               “Tell me,” he said after a moment, his face relaxing back into a smile, “do you play pai sho?”</p><p>               She had when she was younger. She had been good at it, too, her ordered mind picking out patterns and tactics that others missed, although she had no skill for improvising and little imagination when it came to moving the little painted tiles around the board. Still, she had been good. A little too good. Azula hadn’t liked that. “No.”</p><p>               “Too bad. What about politics?”</p><p>               How had they gotten from board games to backstabbing? Mai had no doubt that was what he meant; no amount of glossy paint could make the pai sho tiles more that bits of fired clay, and no amount of polite language and beautiful manners could make politics here at the heart of the Fire Nation anything other than what they were.</p><p>               She thought of her mother. She did not think of her father. He had been good at playing too, but not good enough to secure some choice position closer to home. Omashu had been a stepping stone, he had said. A stepping stone straight into the grave, as it turned out. Politics were like that. It was a morbid thought, and it troubled Mai very little. Nothing troubled Mai. “Some.”</p><p>               Iroh beamed at her. “Good. I’ll give you time to wash up and change, and then there’s something that I want to show you.”</p><p>               Mai was intrigued in spite of herself, so she agreed and showed him out of the rooms – her rooms, at least for the time being. The maid left Tom-Tom long enough to lay out a fresh set of clothes, and Mai made quick use of the hot water supplied in a small room off the bedchamber before going to find Iroh.</p><p>               When Iroh touched her arm to guide her down the hall, she was sure he was using it as an opportunity to check beneath the flowing silk of her sleeves to see if her wrist sheaths were in place. That didn’t bother her so much as the impression that he <em>approved</em> of her being armed within the palace. There should have been no need for weapons here, under the watchful eyes of the bulk of the remaining Fire Nation tropps.</p><p>               Mai found herself standing in front of the enormous doors leading to the throne room, which had been repaired at some point during her absence. Iroh made no move to signal the guards standing sentry, instead guiding her in through a small side door. She paused once inside, letting her eyes adjust to the near complete darkness. The light – the <em>only</em> light within that room – was cast by the flames that surrounded the dais in a wall of flickering heat. The Fire Lord sat on his throne, his back straight, his face thrown into sharp relief by the fire. The scar, in particular, stood out, small shadows cast across the less-than-smooth skin over his eye. Before him knelt a dozen of his councilors.</p><p>               Seeing Zuko again was made a great deal easier by having a cavernous room and a wall of fire between them, Mai reflected. If that had been Iroh’s reason for bringing her here, then she was impressed.</p><p>               It soon became obvious, however, that the general’s intentions were quite different. “Sit,” he told her, quietly so as not to draw the attention of the other occupants of the throne room. He knelt in the shadows of one of the room’s great pillars. “Watch.”</p><p>               Carefully, Mai knelt beside him.</p><p>               She did not like what she saw.</p><p>               “Fire Lord Zuko,” said one of the councilors. Mai immediately identified him as Lord Wei, one of her father’s friends. When she had been nine, he had suggested an alliance between her and his eldest son. Her parents had refused; by then, Mai had been in and out of the palace on a daily basis to visit Azula, and they had set their sights on a much more advantageous match. “Surely it has become obvious by now that this experiment with the smallholdings has failed. It has been almost six months since they were established, and they are yet to become productive. Soon we will have to rely on the Earth Kingdom for food.”</p><p>               Mai glanced at Iroh for an explanation. He leaned forward, speaking softly into her ear.</p><p>               “Part of Zuko’s conditions when pardoning many of Ozai’s old supporters and allowing them to retain their positions and power was that they each give up a sizable portion of their lands.”</p><p>               A soft breath escaped Mai, almost a hiss, although her face remained impassive. She was sure that more than one Agni Kai had been fought over that one; the great and good of the Fire Nation would not have liked giving up lands that had been theirs for generations.</p><p>               Iroh nodded, as if she had voiced the thought. “The lands that he received in return for his forgiveness were converted into smallholder farms and used to help resettle the soldiers who were returning from the war, those who had been discharged from the army after the treaty with the Earth Kingdom was signed.”</p><p>               She answered, since he seemed to be waiting for her to speak. “That would allow the returning soldiers to make a living, and help avert the threat of a food shortage. Fire Nation soil is very fertile, from what I understand. Something to do with all the volcanoes?” She didn’t really understand all that dirt-grubbing stuff, and was happy to leave it to the farmers and laborers. However, some principles were so basic that even she understood them, and she counted back the months since Zuko had taken the throne. She remembered the stretch of fields outside her own estate, green just starting to ripen to gold, tomato-carrots plump but still hard on the vine. “Nothing is ready to harvest yet. How can Wei complain that the farms aren’t productive?”</p><p>               In the background, Mai heard Zuko echo her words, much more placidly than she would have expected from him. Really, Mai would have anticipated a mortality rate somewhere in the double digits after ten minutes of Zuko being forced to listen to his councilors blather. It made her a little sad. The boy she had known was all grown up and playing the king.</p><p>               “What you say is true,” Iroh said, his voice quiet. “It is also true that soldiers returning home after a long war need a way to occupy their idle hands, or they will find things to occupy them.” Out of the corner of her eye, Mai could see the rueful expression on Iroh’s face. “Things significantly less productive than farming.”</p><p>               Mai remembered the thrill of a knife in her hand and the slight flick of wrist that would send it flying. “I can understand that.”</p><p>               “I’m sure you can,” Iroh said, his voice deceptively mild.</p><p>               “I can also understand why his councilors are fighting him every step of the way,” she added, and was gratified to see Iroh glance sharply in her direction. “Don’t misunderstand me. Zuko is doing—well, what he feels needs to be done, I suppose.” She waved dismissive fingers through the air, hand so heavy on her wrist that it drooped. She wouldn’t admit that some of the things he was doing were necessary, even admirable. “But he’s made them barter for their lives with their wealth. He’s ended the war. He’s changing their – our – way of life, and he’s doing it fast and hard.”</p><p>               “He’s the Fire Lord,” Iroh said. “He shouldn’t have to please them.” He didn’t sound like he really believed that. He was testing her. Mai had always hated being tested. She had intentionally failed one or two during her days at the Academy, just to prove the point. The memory still made her ear feel blistered by the heat of her mother's scolding.</p><p>               She thought about remaining silent. Iroh clearly expected an answer. Mai sighed.</p><p>               “How far did Fire Lord Ozai go to please them, during the early days of his reign? He was a second son whose royal father died under mysterious circumstances. He never would have gone on to become the Fire Lord he was if he hadn’t spent the first few years of his reign alternately threatening and pandering to his court and his people, and if the only other candidate for the throne hadn’t proven to be useless in the eyes of the nation.” There was a sort of vicious pleasure in saying that to Iroh’s face, a cruelty to it that she recognized as being far, far too reminiscent of Azula. She stopped, breathed deep, and let her emotions slide back beneath the silent, still waters of her carefully controlled mind.</p><p>               With her rebellious feelings kept in check, she was suddenly bored with their conversation and with the spectacle of watching Zuko attempt to coral his councilors. When there was no passion or ambition to drive them, no one could deny that politics were deeply dull. She slumped against the column closest to her and fixed her eyes on the fire enshrouded throne. “I don’t doubt that the people adore him,” she said, “but he would do well to remember that the men and women in this room are much closer to him, and much more inclined to poison his dinner.”</p><p>               Her stomach gave an uncomfortable twist at that.</p><p>               “You’re sure that you won’t play pai sho with me?’ Iroh asked.</p><p>               “Games bore me,” she said. “Why did you want me to see this?”</p><p>               “Since you’ve returned to the capital, I thought it important that you know the state of things here.” He shrugged genially.</p><p>               “I’m here to search for Princess Ursa, not to take tea with the Admiral of the Fleet. Everything I need to know to complete my mission is almost ten years in the past. You didn't have to show me this.”</p><p>               Iroh looked at her. His eyes gleamed with reflected firelight from the throne. “You asked me how he was doing, Lady Mai.”</p><p>               “With all due respect,” Lord Wei said, drawing Mai’s gaze to him, his creased familiar face smiling and his eyes hard, “you are very young.”</p><p>               The wall of flames flickered ominously.</p><p>               “I am the Fire Lord,” Zuko said, and his voice was iron and fire.</p><p>               “I meant no offense,” Wei said, quickly, but the words slipped over his tongue without touching his heart, the lack of sincerity obvious.</p><p>               “This is your answer,” Iroh told her.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>               It was with relief that Mai escaped the throne room, as quietly as she had entered and with as little notice from any of the room’s occupants. Iroh remained behind, intending to speak to Zuko once the young Fire Lord was done with his councilors.</p>
<p>               Her relief was short-lived. She had barely stepped out through the room’s small, half-hidden side door when the great double doors beside it swung open, and Zuko’s councilors came streaming out. She took a step back and most of them walked past her, deeply absorbed in their own conversations or the promise of a late breakfast. It was pure bad luck that Wei glanced her way and stopped.</p>
<p>               “Lord Wei,” she said, when she realized that interaction was inevitable.</p>
<p>               “Mai!” he said, with a great deal more warmth than she had shown, his big voice hearty with what seemed to be genuine happiness to see her. “I hadn’t realized that you had returned to the capital.”</p>
<p>               She could have told him the truth. Iroh had left no specific instructions when it came to who could and could not know about the search for Ursa, and Wei was a family friend. Even as the thought crossed her mind, she discarded it. “The country air didn’t agree with me." She bit back a sigh when she realized her answer sounded like one of Lee’s excuses.</p>
<p>               Wei didn’t seem to notice, nodding in sympathetic agreement. “I understand. To tell you the truth, I was worried about you, all alone in that big house. I’m quite certain that your father would not have approved.”</p>
<p>               By the time of his death, her father had not had a great deal of say in what she did and did not do, but that wasn't a topic she was interested in discussing with Wei. “Your concern is greatly appreciated,” she told him instead. Then, since she sounded bored even to her own ears, she added, “I wasn’t entirely alone. My brother was returned to me this past week.”</p>
<p>               “Ah, yes,” Wei nodded his graying head. “But a child is no company for such a beautiful young woman. You need to be among your peers.” He glanced her over. “My son still thinks of you kindly.”</p>
<p>               “Indeed.”</p>
<p>               The warning in her voice was obvious enough that he smiled and let the subject go. “Where are you going? May I walk you there?”</p>
<p>               “The royal archives,” she said, since that seemed as good a place as any to start the search for Ursa. Once again, she didn’t tell him why, even though he looked at her with open curiosity and let the conversation lapse into a delicate silence that she was obviously intended to fill.</p>
<p>               She could tell him. Iroh hadn’t told her not to.</p>
<p>               She remembered how he had spoken to Zuko in the throne room, and any words she might have said withered on her lips.</p>
<p>               “I would be happy to accompany you,” he said, when no answer to his unspoken question was forthcoming.</p>
<p>               They turned and started down the hall. Mai had just become accustomed to the silence when Wei once again began to speak. “How much of our little meeting did you hear?” He laughed at the sharp glance she cut his way. “What other reason for you to be so close to the throne room? Don’t worry, I can understand perfectly well why you would eavesdrop. You’re your father’s daughter, after all, and it’s natural that you would want to know what’s going on after spending such a long time away.” He shook his head. “Disgraceful, isn’t it?”</p>
<p>               Indifference had always been her best defense. “Hmm?”</p>
<p>               “Why, the current state of affairs!” Wei said, in his too-loud voice. “That puppy is hamstringing his own country. First the peace declaration, and now this pathetic attempt to win the favor of a few peasants.”</p>
<p>               For a moment Mai’s mind stopped working, before it returned to sudden, whirring life. Strange, she thought, that he was speaking to her as if she was a natural ally. Perhaps she was, as the daughter of an old and trusted friend, especially since she was certain that Zuko had done nothing to publicize her part in his fight with Azula. Strange, still, for him to feel comfortable disparaging the Fire Lord so openly.</p>
<p><em>               It’s a foolish man who speaks too freely and listens too little,</em> her father had told her once, when she was young and he had still been willing on occasion to take her into his lap while he answered letters or ate his dinner at his desk. His own career had proven that creed to be an unshakable truth. He hadn’t been a clever man, her father, and he was far more loyal to his family than he ever had been to the Fire Nation. He had achieved his position in part by being silent and knowing who to listen to and how to use what he heard, when to speak and flatter and fawn and when to hold his tongue.</p>
<p>               “It’s more wise than foolish to seek the approval of the people he’s ruling,” Mai replied. Her shoulders lifted and fell in an uncaring shrug, because she <em>didn’t</em> care, not really. “I agree that maybe he should spend more time listening to the voices that have shaped this nation since his grandfather’s time rather than relenting to the demands of farmers and soldiers, but I don’t think it’s quite so dire as you make it out to be.”</p>
<p>               “You’re very young,” Wei said dismissively. Mai’s eyes narrowed.</p>
<p>               “Yes, I heard that, too,” she said, her voice carefully devoid of tone. “The Fire Lord is probably less likely to overlook such reminders than I am.”</p>
<p>               Wei laughed and gave her a courtier’s smile: warm, and fading well before it touched his eyes. “I’m sorry. I’ve offended you. My son tells me that I’m too quick to dismiss the opinion of anyone under the age of forty. Perhaps he’s right.” He touched her elbow to guide her around a corner, and it was instinct more than intention that made her caress the springs that would release her knives into her hands.</p>
<p>               Perhaps there was a little bit of intention in it, she thought, as she dropped her fingers away from her wrists. Killing him seemed like the only way to get him to shut up. Nothing more dull in this world than a man who liked to hear himself speak.</p>
<p>               “You were close to Fire Lord Zuko once, were you not?”</p>
<p>               “Once.”</p>
<p>               “Ah,” he said, as if her monosyllabic answer had given him all the information he could possibly need about her, about Zuko, about anything and everything that had passed between them. “Maybe it’s best that you reconsidered. I know your mother had her hopes, but as things now stand I’d hate to see you at the Fire Lord’s side. That’s no safe place to be, not these days.”</p>
<p>               Something cold and hard settled in Mai’s stomach, even if Wei was only confirming what she had so recently told Iroh. Perhaps what chilled her was that he was speaking treason so candidly, as if he had no fear at all of there being repercussions.</p>
<p>               “What makes you think that <em>I</em> was the one to reconsider?”</p>
<p>               Wei stopped. His hand on her elbow forced her to stop with him, even when Mai would have happily swept on and left him in her wake. There was a look of sharp realization on his face, and perhaps it had been stupid of her to let Wei know that she was more Zuko’s ally than his, but she couldn’t bring herself to regret it. The way that his mouth hung open for a moment in mute disbelief, all of his careful dignity briefly fallen by the wayside, was worth any future trouble. “I see.” He tried for a smile and mostly succeeded. “If I was mistaken, take it only as an sign of my regard for you, dear girl. I wouldn't have imagined him casting off anyone so lovely.” He ducked his head, words that had started out stiff turning oily slick by the time he was finished. “Please forgive the assumption.”</p>
<p>               “Of course. All is forgiven.” Mai shook off his hand. “I believe that I can go the rest of the way on my own.”</p>
<p>               He was almost too quick for politeness in his agreement. “Take care of yourself, Lady Mai. Your father would never forgive me if something happened to you.” His gaze lingered on her a moment longer, and then he turned disappeared down the hall in a swirl of crimson-and-gold robes. She continued on to the archives alone.</p>
<p>               The archivist was small, white-haired, and looked to be about a hundred. He let her in with a minimum of protest, although he didn’t seem pleased at having his solitude disrupted. He didn’t question her request for all of the records of banishment and execution from the years of Ozai’s reign, eager to give her what she needed so that he could return to his own pile of scrolls and crumbling tomes.</p>
<p>               The room’s single long table was wedged tightly enough between the rows of dusty shelves that she had difficultly pulling out one of the seats far enough to settle into it. Reading through the register of banishments the archivist provided her took time; the writing was legible but small, and the scroll would have been twice her height if she had unrolled to its full length. She poured over it a little at a time, her head bent close to the paper to make out the names written there. It was painfully tedious. She’d excelled while she was at the Academy, fulfilled every expectation her parents had ever had of a daughter, but she’d never actually enjoyed squinting by candlelight or scratching out poems and answers to her instructor’s questions. The material she had been given here was even more dreary than the texts she had studied as a child. More than once, she found her eyelids drooping and the names and dates on the scroll blurring together.</p>
<p>               She paused only once, when she reached Zuko’s name. There, in plain, black ink, devoid of details, was the ruling that had turned all their young lives – Zuko’s, Azula’s, even hers – upside down. How very strange. She wondered if it had ever occurred to Ozai that, had he acted with a little more forbearance toward his eldest child, he might have kept possession of both his throne and his life. No, most likely there hadn’t been time for him to think anything of the kind.</p>
<p>               She wondered if Azula thought about it.</p>
<p>               Long before she reached the end of the scroll, it became clear to her that she wouldn’t find what she was looking for. “May I have the records for the last few years of Fire Lord Azulon’s rule?” she asked without looking up. The little man grumbled at her but complied, dropping a new scroll on the table beside her with every indication that she was inconveniencing him horribly.</p>
<p>               Even though she knew that she would find what she was looking at the very end of the scroll if it was there to be found at all, she forced herself to read the entire thing with care, the long list of all crimes awful enough to warrant death or exile during the last five years of Azulon’s rule.</p>
<p>               Ursa’s name did not appear on either scroll. There was no record of her banishment.</p>
<p>               “Is there documentation of royal births and deaths for the last few decades?” Mai asked, even though she doubted that her either her patience or her eyesight would survive another registry filled with cramped black characters.</p>
<p>               “Of course,” the archivist said, his faded gray eyes annoyed as he looked at her over a set of thick spectacles. “The Fire Sages have it, though. I would have to request that they send it over to me.”</p>
<p>               There was a long, drawn out pause.</p>
<p>               “Can you?”</p>
<p>               The archivist made a short, annoyed noise. “I <em>can</em>. You can’t look at them, though. Not without permission. <em>Royal</em> permission,” he added, as if there was any question about what he meant. The look on his face said clearly that he doubted she could <em>get</em> such permission.</p>
<p>               “Thank you,” Mai said shortly. She didn’t bother to tidy the scrolls she had used before she left, and she could hear him grunt his displeasure from behind her. Access to the records held by the Fire Sages was something she would have to talk to Iroh about. For now, she intended to return to the relative peace of the guest quarters she had been assigned.</p>
<p>               Her quarters were in chaos.</p>
<p>               The maid she had brought with her was having hysterics in the center of the sitting room, fat tears running down her cheeks. A pair of significantly more efficient palace maids were having significantly more contained hysterics while tearing her the room apart, one cushion at a time. Lee was watching it all with his arms crossed over his chest, evidently fascinated by the whole process.</p>
<p>               Her maid immediately began to babble incoherent, sobbing apologies. Mai looked at Lee.</p>
<p>               “Your brother has gone missing,” he explained. “I really don’t think he’s under there,” he added helpfully to one of the palace maids as she plucked a small oil lamp from off the desk and checked beneath it.</p>
<p>               “Missing?” Mai said. Her voice was silk smooth, and hid admirably the completely inexplicable surge of panic that she felt at the news.</p>
<p>               “I doubt it’s anything to worry about,” Lee said. “How much trouble can one toddler get into?”</p>
<p>               “The last time he wandered off on his own he was kidnapped by a band of Earth Kingdom rebels.”</p>
<p>               “Huh.” Lee looked a little impressed by Tom-Tom’s virtuosity at imperiling himself. “We’re not in Omashu, though. We’re at the heart of the Fire Nation. We’re <em>inside</em> the palace.”</p>
<p>               “I also may have made an enemy,” Mai said. Suddenly, the look Wei had worn when she had revealed that she had not been the one to cast off Zuko was less amusing. There had been shock on his face, but she wondered now if that had been cold cunning and not surprise in his eyes. “Inside the palace.”</p>
<p>               Now Lee looked impressed by <em>her</em> virtuosity. “We’ve only been here a day.”</p>
<p>               “I’ll find him,” Mai said abruptly. She strode out the door and back down the hall without waiting for a response, away from Lee and the upheaval in her quarters. She was sure that her brother, fully mobile and having already displayed a rather marked amount of wanderlust, would not have remained so close to home.</p>
<p>               Halfway down the corridor she was rewarded with the first sign that her brother had in fact passed this way. There was a sticky smudge on the edge of a painting of Lady Ilah, near her right foot. Azulon’s wife gazed reproachfully down at Mai, as if chastising her for her brother’s misbehavior.</p>
<p>               Two hallways down and one quick left turn latter, she found a vase toppled from its alcove. Another turn, and a little red leather bootie that she recognized as belonging to Tom-Tom caught her eye. She scooped it up and continued to the end of the hall, realizing with a sense of foreboding that she was approaching the royal wing of the palace. She hadn’t trespassed here since the day of her trial. She undoubtedly was not supposed to be here now, but the hallways were empty and no one challenged her presence.</p>
<p>               Another corner.</p>
<p>               Not twenty feet in front of her stood her brother.</p>
<p>               Tom-Tom saw her. He giggled once and then immediately began to run in the opposite direction, as if he <em>knew</em> what she was thinking of doing to him as soon as she caught him.</p>
<p>               His chubby little legs carried him with amazing speed down the hall and through the first open door he found. Mai followed at a more sedate pace. She refused to hurry when her quarry was cornered and her dignity was at stake. She regretted the choice when she found her brother, who was obviously more cunning that she gave him credit for and seemed to harbor some unresolved hated toward her for attempting to abandon him to the Avatar, trying to pull himself into the Fire Lord’s lap.</p>
<p>               Zuko looked down, his face a mask of surprise at finding a pair of determined little baby hands clinging to his robes. Then he looked up.</p>
<p>               If Mai hadn’t had all outward signs of emotion trained out of her by the age of five, she might have cringed. Instead, she remained impassive. “My apologies, Fire Lord Zuko.”</p>
<p>               She reached forward and tried to pick up Tom-Tom. His fists remained firmly wrapped around their silken prize, and he made a noise of protest that indicated a fine tantrum to come if she continued to try to separate them.</p>
<p>               “Mai?”</p>
<p>               She wondered if her sudden appearance or her brother’s behavior accounted for how absolutely gobsmacked Zuko sounded. She didn’t respond, hoping to retrieve Tom-Tom and retreat before Zuko fully recovered. Unfortunately, Tom-Tom was not in a cooperative frame of mind.</p>
<p>               “Why me?” she muttered, and gave her brother another tug.</p>
<p>               “Because you fought for me instead of Azula.”</p>
<p>               It was enough to make her pause.</p>
<p>
  <em>               Because—.</em>
</p>
<p>               That hadn’t really been the question she was asking, although it was nice to know. Or maybe that <em>was</em> the answer to her question. The heavens were punishing her because, in a moment of lapsed judgment, she had chosen to betray Azula and defend Zuko.</p>
<p>               And Mai, who had been taught never to speak unless spoken to and <em>certainly</em> never to speak without thinking, said, “I didn’t mean to.”</p>
<p>               One more tug and she successfully dislodged Tom-Tom. She managed to bow around her armful of squirming toddler, and she was out of the room before he could draw the breath to scream and before Zuko could find the words to speak.</p>
<p>               By the time that she managed to locate Iroh, Tom-Tom was wailing at the top of his lungs and driving his little heels into her stomach hard enough that she knew she would find bruises the next morning. Judging by the smell, he had also soiled his diaper. Mai was certain that he had done it to spite her.</p>
<p>               The old man looked up from his tea. The shock on his face transformed swiftly to amusement.</p>
<p>               “I need you to find me a nurse,” Mai said.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>hey siri, is it still kidfic if Iroh is the only one who thinks that children are cute?</p>
<p>I've still got a handful of chapters written back in '08, but I'm almost done editing and I'm going to slow my posting schedule down to once a week to keep a little buffer while I work on new content.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Chapter 6</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I have no excuses. I am a weak person who shouldn't be trusted with buffer chapters. Regularly scheduled weekly updates start next Monday.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>               Sleep was a fairly innocuous way to relieve boredom, so Mai did not rise with the sun. Judging by the wailing coming from the other room, this was not a characteristic that she and her brother shared. For a while she remained in bed with her pillow pressed firmly enough over her face that suffocation became a real concern. Eventually she was forced to concede victory in the face of a rival who also didn’t seem to share her need to <em>breathe</em>, given as there was rarely a pause between one cry and the next. She wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep, and so she slumped out of the bed with something that might have been a sigh but also might have been a snarl.</p><p>               Lee was in the sitting room, his legs folded half-lotus, his eyes closed. “I think he needs changing,” her former teacher informed her, without moving or opening his eyes.</p><p>               “And changing a toddler’s diaper was too difficult for a warrior of your capabilities?”</p><p>               He cracked one eye and grinned at her. “Babies are bad for my delicate nerves,” he told her blandly. “The mere thought of picking one up makes my heart start beating like a war drum. Changing a diaper would leave me bedridden for days. I might swoon.”</p><p>               Mai looked at him through narrowed eyes, making it clear how difficult she found it to believe that a man who had once knocked a scorpion-moth off her cheek with his shaving razor from forty feet away had <em>delicate nerves</em>.</p><p>               “Go take care of your brother.” Much to her disgust, he removed his hands from his knees long enough to make shooing motions at her. “It’s your own fault for dismissing your maid. Go, go.”</p><p>               Mai completed that unpleasant task and emerged from Tom-Tom’s room, dirty diaper in hand, to find Iroh waiting for her. “Good,” she said, and handed him the diaper. Her mother would have been appalled, but if Iroh was going to insist on being treated like family and appear in her quarters at an hour early enough she hadn’t fully come to terms with having to speak to other people, then he wasn’t going to get her <em>nice</em> manners.</p><p>               Iroh took the soiled diaper without comment, wrapping it into a much neater bundle than she would have managed. “I have a list of suitable nursemaids for you.”</p><p>               “When can I meet them?” Soon, she hoped. She wished to count the time she would be responsible for cleaning and feeding her brother in hours, not days.</p><p>               Iroh looked away, his face a mask of innocence that made her instantly suspicious. “The first candidate is waiting out in the hall.”</p><p>               A brief silence followed, in which Mai took reviewed her own state of disarray: still dressed in her nightclothes, hair tangled from the pillow, fingers undoubtedly covered in something unspeakable. <em>Soon</em>. She should have known that any wish directed at Iroh would become a monkey-bear’s paw. “Why did that seem like a good idea to you?”</p><p>               “Most people rise with the sun,” Iroh said with a shrug and a smile. “The traveler that waits until morning to pack his bags cannot cry when the boat leaves without him.”</p><p>               “What?”</p><p>               Lee snorted from his place on the floor. “Go get dressed, Lady Mai,” he said. “I’ll greet your guest.”</p><p>               “I’ve asked one of the servants to bring us in some tea,” Iroh added.</p><p>               “Of course you did.”</p><p>               Mai returned to her room. She was a wise enough warrior to know when she had been outmaneuvered in battle. She rifled through her clothing quickly, pushing aside the first few garments that came to hand as too elaborate and formal for interviewing a prospective employee. A brilliantly pink robe came slinking out of the bottom of her wardrobe, and she nudged it to one side with her toe. Why did she <em>own</em> that? Why had the maid even packed it? It only reminded her just how useless the girl had been. Eventually she found a skirt and wide-sleeved jacket made of finely woven grass linen, both dyed a pure, unrelieved black. Acceptable. The color matched her mood.</p><p>               When she emerged from her room she found a neatly dressed young woman seated comfortably on one of the couches, a parasol propped against her knees and a large, ugly bag at her feet. Mai sat across from her, wearing an expression as stonily resolved as that of any young general preparing to lead his troops into battle. Iroh placed the tea things between them, but neither woman made a move to take a cup. He shrugged and poured two cups, taking one for himself and giving the other to Lee, who was standing near the window and watching the would-be nursemaid with half-lidded eyes.</p><p>               “You brought references?”</p><p>               The woman smiled merrily at Mai. “Oh, I make it a point never to give references. A very old-fashioned idea to my mind.”</p><p>               “Yes,” Mai said, in a tone that had been known to strip the paint from walls, “after all, why would anyone need to know that you’re marginally trustworthy or competent before hiring you to care for a child?” When the woman continued to smile, she sighed and continued. “Are you at all qualified for this post?”</p><p>               “I'm very qualified. I have a cheery disposition, and am never cross. Then there are my rosy cheeks, obviously. I play games, all sorts. I'm sure your child will find my games extremely diverting. I am kind—.”</p><p>               Somewhere between <em>cheery disposition</em> and <em>games, all sorts</em>, Mai turned to Iroh. When the woman was finally forced to pause for breath, Mai spoke.</p><p>               “Make her <em>go away</em>.”</p><p>               Iroh looked dismayed, but he hustled the woman out the door, parasol and ugly bag and all. When he returned, Mai gave him a look of thin-lipped annoyance.</p><p>               “She seemed nice,” he said, although she could hear the apology in his voice.</p><p>               “She seemed deranged.”</p><p>               “Am I the only one who thought she might burst into song?” Lee wondered. When both Mai and Iroh looked at him, he shrugged. “I guess so.”</p><p>               “Are you ready for the next one?” Iroh asked.</p><p>               “There are more?”</p><p>               Of course there were more.</p><p>               As it turned out, there were fourteen more, none of them with any more promise than the first. Mai was bored before she was even done interviewing number three, and she stared at each of the following nurses through a haze of bleak lethargy. Spirits, would it never <em>end</em>?</p><p>               “This is the last,” Iroh told her, with the air of someone promising a child a treat in return for good behavior. It was just the two of them, now; Lee had long since wandered off to find some other occupation, and Mai had to remind herself that envy was both petty and common. She tried to force her spine back into a more vertical position, but even the promise that her search would soon be over for the day wasn’t enough to cheer her.</p><p>               Maybe she would just hire the next interviewee, regardless of how capable or qualified they were. It was a tempting thought, since it meant that she wouldn’t have to sit through another day of this torture. The idea seemed even more promising when the woman entered. She was tall and austere, dressed as severely as Mai was in black and dark gray without so much as a single decorative button or hint of embroidery. She even provided references, one of them from a general whose name Mai recognized from her mother’s guest lists, back when her father had still been stationed in the Fire Nation. It seemed like it might work, and so Mai pulled herself out of her delirium of boredom far enough to actually listen to what the woman was saying.</p><p>               “I believe that a strictly structured environment is the only way to properly care for a child’s needs and ensure that they grow up to be a contributing member of our great Nation,” she said, her voice clipped. “I trust that you agree, Lady Mai. I’ve worked in several of the great households, and all of my previous employers have been very concerned with the proper behavior of their children. Rest assured that if you were to hire me, your brother would never again trouble you with childish antics or conduct unbecoming a young man of his station. With rigorous discipline, along with appropriate rewards for good behavior, I can train him to behave with the not just decorum, but all of the manners and graces that will be required of him as he leaves the nursery and enters into more elevated company.”</p><p>               Iroh regarded the woman with a sort of morbid fascination, as if he was wondering how she had come to be in the room. His chuckle sounded a little forced. “Now, now. He’s barely more than an infant. Surely he’s too young to be so concerned about, er, <em>decorum</em>?”</p><p>               “Sir, with all due respect, it is never too early to impress upon a child the importance of silence and stillness. If you let them go too long, they turn into boisterous little terrors, ruined for life.”</p><p>               Both of them looked at Mai when she sat forward on the couch, her movements languid but suddenly more alert. “In other words,” she said, “you believe that a child should behave, and sit still, and not speak unless spoken to.”</p><p>               She was interested to see that the look on Iroh’s face bordered on repugnance, although he made no move to stay her sudden interest in this candidate. The woman nodded, and for the first time since entering the room she looked animated. “Exactly.”</p><p>               She stopped nodding only when a blade whistled past her ear and embedded itself in the wall behind her. She looked at Mai for a long moment, wide-eyed. The muscles in her throat constricted visibly as she swallowed. She said nothing, only stood and left the room as quickly as she could.</p><p>               Iroh relaxed noticeably. “I think that was a wise decision.”</p><p>               “Oh, yes,” Mai rolled to her feet to recover her knife. “Obviously, her nerves were not up to the task.” She braced her hand against the wall and twisted the knife free, leaving a gouge in the wood paneling. “For all her talk about appropriate conduct, she left without expressing gratitude for my time or even saying a proper farewell. It would be a mistake, I think, to hire a nurse who doesn’t practice her own policies. She would set a dreadful example for Tom-Tom.”</p><p>               “Of course,” Iroh said. Mai pretended not to notice that he was hiding a smile in his sleeve. Instead she sighed, the momentary entertainment provided by the last candidate quickly fading.</p><p>               “I suppose we’re back to this tomorrow, then?”</p><p>               “Well.”</p><p>               “Well?”</p><p>               “I have been thinking.”</p><p>               “Yes?”</p><p>               “Perhaps the typical sort of nursemaid is not what you need.” Iroh stroked his beard. “I may know someone who is good with children, although she has no formal background in caring for them, and who also has somewhat <em>steadier nerves</em> than some of the other candidates have shown.” He smiled at her. “Former military, you understand.”</p><p>               “That sounds satisfactory. Can I meet her?” Mai wanted to ask him what the catch was. He seemed much more pleased with himself than even the not-so-simple task of procuring a nursemaid for Tom-Tom would warrant.</p><p>               “Of course!”</p><p>               Mai was not entirely surprised when there was a knock at the door. It confirmed her growing suspicion that Iroh had planned this all. She sighed, sat herself back on the couch, and waited with little enthusiasm but a great deal of resignation for the old general to reveal his next trick.</p><p>               Instead of a trick, he opened the door to reveal a woman not so much older than Mai, who carried herself like a soldier even though she was dressed like a civilian. Mai motioned her toward the much depleted tea supplies, and the woman sat.</p><p>               “Mai, I would like to introduce you to Ming.”</p><p>               Ming inclined her head to Mai, as close to a bow as she could come while sitting. Mai got the distinct impression that she would have rather liked to salute, but that sort of thing was for the parade ground, not the parlor. She was a little gratified to see that the former soldier seemed just as baffled to be there as Mai was to have her; at least she wasn’t the only one sideswiped by Iroh’s machinations.</p><p>               “I understand you would like to apply for a post,” she said. She tapped the knife she had pulled out of the wall lightly against her own knee, just to see the Ming’s nerves were as steady as Iroh claimed. Dark eyes glanced down in the direction of the knife but only lingered briefly before returning to Mai’s face.</p><p>               “I am.”</p><p>               As difficult to unnerve as Iroh had promised, and there was something of kindness around her mouth that none of Mai’s own nurses or tutors had possessed, as if she smiled more often than not. She wasn’t smiling now, but that at least showed that she wasn’t <em>excessively</em> cheerful. Ty Lee would have been smiling. “Do you have any references?”</p><p>               “Only General Iroh.”</p><p>               He was as much a former general as Ming was a former soldier, but Mai didn’t correct her. The title was probably more appropriate than Ming realized, even if Iroh no longer held the post. The old man was still planning maneuvers and outwitting his enemies, even if the field of engagement had changed dramatically. “Qualifications?”</p><p>               Ming began to smile, stopped herself, and returned her face to funeral procession sobriety. “I have younger siblings, my lady.”</p><p>               If this candidate hadn’t been personally recommended by Iroh, Mai would have mocked her out of the room. “I see. Iroh tells me that you’re former military, so I must assume that you were released from duty when the majority of the army was disbanded. If you have no experience in caring for children, what have you been doing in the intervening months?” She saw Iroh look at her sharply and ignored him.</p><p>               “Guard duty, for merchants and the like. Some bodyguard work. I went home for a bit, too.” The woman seemed a bit confused, as if she wasn’t sure why this was important, but Iroh was still looking at Mai and now she knew <em>why</em> he had suggested a former soldier as a nursemaid. It was a good thought, although she didn’t find it particularly comforting that he seemed to think that she was in a position where her family needed to be well guarded.</p><p>               She considered, her impassive gaze never leaving Ming, although she did still her hands when she realized she was once again drumming the point of her knife against her knee, this time without intending to. Ming was hardly an appropriate instructor for Tom-Tom; she wasn’t uneducated – very few children in the Fire Nation were – but Mai would guess her family was middle class at best, and her years in the army wouldn’t have provided her with any kind of special training in the kind of <em>manners</em> and <em>decorum</em> that Mai’s last disastrous candidate had waxed lyrical about. She would be unfamiliar with the rules and protocols that Tom-Tom would have to learn, eventually. However, Iroh had also been right when he had said that her brother was too young right now to be concerned with such things. Mostly, she needed someone who could change his diapers, feed him, and keep him out of trouble. Surely a former soldier was capable of all that—particularly the last part. Possibly even more capable than a nursemaid.</p><p>               “Very well,” she said, finally sheathing her knife beneath the billowing sleeves that draped over her wrists. “I will speak with one of the palace scribes. They will draw up a contract for you, with your duties and compensation thoroughly outlined.” With that decided, she promptly lost all interest in Ming, pointing her toward Tom-Tom’s bedroom door. “You can start immediately.”</p><p>               Ming glanced quickly at Iroh, who nodded his approval. With an air of relief, Ming rose from her seat and retreated from the room.</p><p>               “Well played,” Mai said, turning her gaze towards the former general. “I’m sure that she has absolutely no idea why you suggested her for the post, and by the time I was done sorting through all the other – entirely unsuitable – candidates, I probably would have selected a three-eyed dragon-hawk rather than sit through any more of this agony.”</p><p>               Iroh said nothing, but his smile was confirmation enough.</p><p>               “Since you seem to take such glee in organizing my life,” Mai continued, “perhaps you can grant me a request.”</p><p>               “Oh?”</p><p>               “It’s possible there may be information about Lady Ursa’s banishment in the Fire Sage’s archives. I need you to give me access to them.”</p><p>               “I would be happy to,” Iroh said, and Mai relaxed into the cushions of the couch. In this, at least, she would get her own way. “However, only the Fire Lord is allowed free access to the archives. Even other members of the royal family have to go through him.”</p><p>               Of course.</p><p>               “And I suppose you’re perfectly incapable of delivering my request to Fire Lord Zuko?” she asked, already knowing the answer.</p><p>               Iroh shrugged helplessly, but his eyes gleamed with satisfaction. “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid that there are desperate matters of tea inventory which require my attention. I can arrange for a meeting, however. Perhaps during the dinner hour? It is possible that my nephew might have a few minutes then to spare.”</p><p>               Mai stared at him, fighting hard to suppress her irritation. In the study of her father’s house, Iroh had looked away first. He granted her no such courtesies now. Mai sighed and turned her head, negligently considering the hole she had made in the wall rather than look at Iroh. “That’s fine. I would be grateful for any time that the Fire Lord can spare to consider my humble request.” She couldn’t help the sarcasm that crept into her voice. Her mother would have died with shame, but her mother was dead already and Mai had shamed her memory so many times over since arriving in Capital City that it hardly mattered.</p><p>               “I’m sure that he will look forward to seeing you,” Iroh said. “It’s been so long since you two talked.”</p><p>               “You are aware that there’s a reason for that?” Iroh opened his mouth, but Mai raised a hand to show that no response was necessary.</p><p>               Iroh left soon after. Mai sank into the deep cushions of the couch and committed herself to not moving from them until the dinner hour arrived.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Chapter 7</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>               The sun was just set, the blazing of the heavens turning to dull crimson and blue with the deepening of twilight. Mai gave the guard who announced her a condescending glance and passed by him into the Fire Lord’s private dining room. Zuko waited there, already seated. He had shed the elaborate, formal robes that he had worn in the throne room, but even in a simply cut coat and pants he looked regal and more grown up than she remembered him being. She shouldn’t have been surprised. If war hadn’t stripped the last of his childhood from him, what little of it was left after Ozai and banishment and defection, then the spending better part of a year on the throne certainly would have.</p>
<p>               He started to rise, then stopped himself. There was no reason for the Fire Lord to leave his seat to greet anyone, even someone with Mai’s wealth and status and good name. Instead, he waited for her bow and motioned her into the chair across from him once she had straightened.</p>
<p>               “My uncle has told me that you have a request to make,” he said, once silent servants had piled both of their plates high with food and retreated out of sight, although probably not out of earshot.</p>
<p>               “I do.”</p>
<p>               “Before we get to that,” Zuko said, his voice low and rasping, almost but not quite pitched in the way that had once called her elusive passions to the surface and made her flushed and feverish and desperate not to let him know how he affected her, “I have a question to ask you.”</p>
<p>               She refused to be surprised. Her face showed nothing. “Yes?”</p>
<p>               He hesitated then plowed on, with the same bluntness that had at once irritated and charmed her, before the war had come between them and he had made his sudden departure for places unknown. “You’ve probably noticed that I don’t have many allies here. What you said in my study—I need to know where you stand, Mai. I need to know where your loyalties lie before I let you go any further in the search for my mother.”</p>
<p>               Half a dozen responses flashed through her mind, most of them disparaging. <em>Oh, Zuko</em>, she thought, unable to name the emotion that made her stomach clench, although despairing amusement probably came closest. Subtlety really was lost on him. “Isn’t it a little late for that?” She took a bite of her smoked sea slug. It was excellent, but she couldn’t savor it. “It’s smart of you to realize that a little bloodshed on your behalf doesn’t mean eternal devotion, but it would have been smarter to realize that before you asked me to look for Princess Ursa.”</p>
<p>               Temper gleamed in his eyes. The scarred one narrowed until it was barely slit. She was almost relieved to see that flash of anger, and then she was annoyed at her own relief. She hadn’t realized that it had unsettled her to see his controlled – for him – display in the throne room the day before, but apparently it had. “Mai.”</p>
<p>               No mistaking the command in his voice.</p>
<p>               She could play this out a little longer, give him evasion rather than unadorned truth. She wondered what it would be like to feel concern for the wellbeing of a parent, to fear for them so deeply that it would rouse her to anger like his. She couldn’t even imagine it, but even the vague picture that she managed to form made her feel—a little more sympathetic. “I’m on your side, Zuko.” How could he do this to her still? How could he move her, even when she wasn’t inclined to be moved?</p>
<p>               Unbidden, an image of Lord Wei rose before her eyes. “Whether I want to be or not,” she added, both to save face and because it was true. Whether or not she had decided she was on his side, others and her own hasty words had decided it for her; that would force her hand.</p>
<p>               He scowled at her before his face went suddenly blank, impassive enough to mirror her own. “You don’t <em>have</em> to do this, Mai. If you really feel like you can’t support me, you can return to the country. I won’t stop you. There will be no consequences for your choice.”</p>
<p>               Mai tried to read his face, his eyes, always so expressive, and failed. The offer baffled her. For her to leave would be tantamount to declaring herself his enemy. To allow her to do so unimpeded would be foolish at best, since Iroh had already told her about his worries regarding his mother. That was dangerous information for an enemy to have, information that she wouldn’t have hesitated to exploit if she really had been his enemy.</p>
<p>               She didn’t <em>understand</em> him.</p>
<p>               To buy time, she took another bite of her food. “If I’m honest,” she said, once she had swallowed, “the thought of returning to the country terrifies me more than the thought of facing down each and every one of your opponents at court single-handedly. Do you know how <em>boring</em> the country is, Zuko?”</p>
<p>               Something in the set of his mouth relaxed. It wasn’t quite a smile, just a release of tension. “Fine.” She could see him gathering himself together, reestablishing himself as the supremely arrogant Fire Lord rather than a teenage boy who just wanted to find his mother. “Your request?”</p>
<p>               “I want access to the Fire Sages’ archives.”</p>
<p>               “You do know that only the Sages and the Fire Lord are permitted there?”</p>
<p>               “Yes. I also know that the royal archives in the palace are useless as a source of information on Princess Ursa’s banishment.”</p>
<p>               “Then you have my permission,” he said, without the slightest hesitation. “I’ll summon one of the Sages and tell them that you’re permitted in the archives as soon as I can.” He paused, his lips pressing together with thought. “Only read the things that might have something to do with my mother’s disappearance, Lady Mai.”</p>
<p>               Apparently the Fire Sages weren’t the only ones getting ordered around tonight. “Of course, Fire Lord Zuko. I’ll try to restrain any idle curiosity I might feel about what Lady Ilah served at her wedding banquet or what Fire Lord Sozin wore for his forty-sixth birthday.”</p>
<p>               They ate the rest of their meal in silence. He served fruit tarts for dessert, and she pretended not to notice but ate two of them before he had even finished his first. When she looked up, she thought she caught him smirking, but the expression was gone again before she could be sure.</p>
<p>               It was only after she left that she realized that not once during the entire meal had she been bored.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>**</p>
<p> </p>
<p>               Mai found a woman dressed in the traditional robes and conical headdress of a Fire Sage waiting outside the door to her rooms when she returned. Her well-muscled arms were crossed over her chest in obvious impatience and her mouth was compressed into a thin, irritated line. When she heard the scuff of Mai’s shoes against the floor she turned the full force of that ire on Mai, her golden eyes glaring like she intended to set Mai aflame without even the tiniest use of bending power. Mai didn’t even bat an eye.</p>
<p>               “Lady Mai,” she said, and her mouth turned down with disapproval. “You have been granted permission to enter the Fire Sages’ <em>secret</em> archives.”</p>
<p>               Mai hadn’t expected Zuko to act so fast. She ought to have. Slow and steady had never exactly been his pace. She lifted her head, staring down her nose at the Sage. “Yes.”</p>
<p>               “I am here to take you there.”</p>
<p>               She also hadn’t expected to begin work tonight, after a grueling morning and her—her reunion with Zuko. However, from the look on the Sage’s face, she would use a refusal as an excuse not to offer again. “Then take me,” Mai said shortly.</p>
<p>               Quicker than she could have anticipated, much quicker than a woman hampered by robes and age should have been able to, the Sage moved behind her and tossed something over Mai’s head. It blocked out the light, the air; it even muffled her hearing. She had one of her knives out before she even thought about reaching for it, the point held low beneath her arm to rest against what she hoped was some vital part of the Sage’s anatomy.</p>
<p>               To her surprise, the Sage chuckled. “Put it away, Lady Mai. Surely you didn’t expect to be allowed knowledge of where the secret histories are kept?”</p>
<p>               In the long moments while she relearned how to breathe through what seemed to be a heavy sack, Mai considered that and found it reasonable. She kept the blade in place a few seconds longer, digging in hard enough to slice through fabric and perhaps even nick skin but not hard enough to cause serious harm, and then she sheathed it.</p>
<p>               “If you’re quite ready?” the Sage asked, annoyance once again weighing heavily in her voice.</p>
<p>               “Whatever.”</p>
<p>               The Sage rested a hand against Mai’s arm and used it to guide her. Their journey passed in silence. When the air turned suddenly cool she knew that they had left the palace; the brevity of their time outdoors let her know that, wherever they were going, it wasn’t far. Heat flared around her, leaving its imprint on her skin and making her heart pound. Then there was the low scrape of stone, and the Fire Sage led her, still blind, down a set of stairs.</p>
<p>               When they reached the bottom of the stairs, the Sage gathered the cloth at the top of Mai’s head and jerked the sack off. One of the small brass weights tied to the edge of the fabric to keep it in place smacked Mai in the cheek and the sudden shift from darkness to light left her eyes watering, but she didn’t complain.</p>
<p>               “I was told that you would be interested in the records from Ozai’s rule,” the Fire Sage said, softly now and more reverent. Mai looked up and found herself staring into the stone-carved eyes of the late Fire Lord.</p>
<p>               Her heart stuttered in her chest.</p>
<p>               A statue. Only a statue.</p>
<p>               The Sage placed her hand against the emblem on Ozai’s chest. Fire flared beneath her touch, traveling upward until flames bled out of Ozai’s mouth and eyes. Mai let her eyelids droop and her mouth tilt into a sulk to show that she wasn’t impressed, but there was a bitter taste on the back of her tongue.</p>
<p>               The statue slid aside to reveal a door, and the Fire Sage motioned her through. “I will return for you in an hour,” she said. She left Mai with a lantern, then disappeared back down the long, dark hallway. Mai watched the Sage until the red of her robe had dwindled into nothingness before stepping into the room.</p>
<p>               It was more cluttered than she would have thought possible, packed to bursting with mementos of Ozai’s rule. Apparently the current Fire Lord did not care to have reminders of his father sitting about the palace. A fine layer of dust had accumulated in the past months, making her nose itch as she moved slowly toward the back of the room, her lantern casting an uncertain light.</p>
<p>               The back wall was carved in a relief, another portrait of Ozai cut out of the stone. His eyebrows were significantly more impressive than she remembered them being in life. Placed before it were a number of long, thin boxes, each of them facing forward so that she could read the characters written on the polished wood. Years and dates, mostly, records of Ozai’s reign. Her fingers twitched when she saw one labeled with the day of Zuko’s banishment, the sight of it kindling the same morbid fascination she had felt upon seeing that same date written in the registry of banishments and executions in the palace archives. She resisted the temptation, smothering her little-used curiosity with ease. She would keep her promise not to look at anything that wasn’t necessary to her mission, for now at least.</p>
<p>               Her eyes traveled on, skimming impatiently over the years before Zuko’s banishment. Finally, her gaze came to rest on the first scroll box, propped carefully into place against the wall.</p>
<p>
  <em>               The Last Testament of Princess Ursa.</em>
</p>
<p>               Mai stifled disappointment as she reached for the box. It was what she had been looking for, but the title implied that the only place where she might find Zuko’s mother was in the Spirit World.</p>
<p>               She put the lantern down and opened the box. Her fingers wrapped around the thin scroll within, and she let the box fall carelessly from her hand.</p>
<p>
  <em>               Once, I sat in my garden and told my son that a mother is justified in any action she takes to protect her children. That is what I have done tonight, and it is as much as any mother would do to defend her baby. I have no regrets. I carried him within me for nine months, his heart beating in time to mine, and even after the cord between us was severed that pulse beat on. Zuko. My son.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>               The Fire Lord is dead. Long live the Fire Lord.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>               This is the last night that I will spend in the Fire Nation. I have packed my things, and my husband has graciously allowed me to say my farewells. Tomorrow I board a ship bound for the Earth Kingdom, accompanied only by a young guard, the third son of one of Azulon’s – Ozai’s, now, I suppose – generals.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>               Goodbye, my homeland. Goodbye, my son. Goodbye, even, to my daughter, who will always be more her father’s than she is mine.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>               I hope that, with time, you will all remember who you are. I hope you will remember what you once were. </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>               Never forget.</em>
</p>
<p>               Mai returned the scroll to where she had found it. A moment’s search found her the records of deaths and banishments for Ozai’s rule. As she had suspected, the ones kept by the Fire Sages were much more complete than those she had read through in the palace archives, although Ursa’s banishment still wasn’t recorded in them. She unrolled the top two inches of the scroll, and a brief glance gave her all the information that she needed.</p>
<p>               Shun, third son of General Heng. Honorably discharged from the army and exiled – <em>there</em> was a contradiction – on the first day of Ozai’s rule. Mai suspected that the young man had actually left the country some time before that, perhaps even on the last day of Azulon’s rule, the same day that Ursa—had done whatever it was that she had done. Mai preferred not to speculate on that portion of her princess’ letter.</p>
<p>               A sigh slipped past her lips when she saw the next line of information.</p>
<p>               Shun had settled in Omashu.</p>
<p>               Of course. It <em>would</em> be Omashu.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>**</p>
<p> </p>
<p>               For the second time that night, Mai returned to her rooms. The Fire Sage removed the hood from her face and left before Mai had entirely blinked away the dazzle of the lanterns burning low outside her door. It was with tired feet and an overactive mind that she entered the suite and found Lee waiting up for her, his thin face lit only by the light of a single candle.</p>
<p>               “You really didn’t have to wait up for me. The Fire Lord didn’t try anything funny with his hands, and he got me home before midnight.” She couldn’t even muster the proper amount of vinegar in her tone when she said it. All she wanted to do was bypass this conversation in favor of the sweet embrace of her bed.  </p>
<p>               Lee made a noncommittal sound. “I’m sorry to hear that your night was such a disappointment. I’m only going to make it worse.”</p>
<p>               Mai ignored the first part but allowed her interest to sharpen at the second, shaking off some of her exhaustion. “Oh?”</p>
<p>               “I had one of the palace maids come in to clean,” he said, “because tidying things sends me into fits. She found this,” he held up the pink robe that she had kicked aside in her earlier quest for something to wear, “and this.”</p>
<p>               It took Mai a moment to recognize what he held in his hand. Zuko’s letter, still unopened. She hadn’t looked at it in so long. Had, in fact, forgotten that she had hidden it away in one of Ty Lee’s more spectacular failures at the art of gift-giving.</p>
<p>               “The maid was understandably concerned when she saw the seal. She thought that she or some other member of the Fire Lord’s staff had mishandled an important message from the crown during yesterday’s search for your brother. I had to explain to her that it was just official dispensation to sigh and mope with impunity while visiting the palace.” Lee shrugged and offered her the scroll. Mai grabbed it. It was only then that she realized the wax of the seal was broken cleanly in half.</p>
<p>               “You read it.”</p>
<p>               “Yes,” he agreed. “I’m shameless that way.”</p>
<p>               “You shouldn’t have. This is private, Lee.”</p>
<p>               “Very private, since I appear to be the <em>first</em> person to read it.” He paused. “Why is that, Mai?”</p>
<p>               Because she had been happier not knowing. Because hearing Azula break the news that Zuko had turned traitor had been hard enough without reading whatever inarticulate and inadequate words he had thought sufficient to explain how he could so easily leave her behind.</p>
<p>               “Excuses bore me,” she said.</p>
<p>               Lee sighed and let his head drop back against the chair. She recognized his posture as a fine imitation of her own, although he didn’t seem aware he was doing it. It was possible that they had been spending too much time in each other’s company.</p>
<p>               “Read it.” He paused, then added, “you silly girl.”</p>
<p>               Mai couldn’t remember the last time anyone had called her <em>silly</em>. Before she could think of an appropriately chilly response, he rose from his seat. He blew out the candle and retreated to his room, leaving her in near darkness with the letter.</p>
<p>               She set the scroll down sharply on the table and went silently into her own room. She had gone this long without knowing. She was content to leave it that way.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Chapter 8</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>               When Mai emerged from her room the next morning to find Lee quietly sipping tea with Ming, Zuko’s letter propped up ostentatiously on the tray between them.</p><p>               “You didn’t read the letter,” he greeted her.</p><p>               “Leave it,” Mai said. Ming looked between the two of them and immediately murmured an excuse and before retreating to Tom-Tom’s room with her tea cup in hand. She had once been a promising enough soldier to be assigned to watch the Fire Nation’s most dangerous criminals. She knew how to assess a situation, consider the possible outcomes, and decide that she didn’t want to be caught in the crossfire. She had done so once before, on the advice of the very man who had secured her this position. Sometimes the best way to persevere was in absence.</p><p>               “Why are you pushing this?” Mai took the chair that Ming had vacated. Her hands were steady on the teapot as she poured, but her fingertips tingled with adrenaline, her body’s ingrained response to knowing that a fight was coming.</p><p>               “I can stop pushing,” Lee said, but he continued before she could snap out the <em>yes please</em> balanced on the tip of her tongue. “I don’t know your Fire Lord. You can’t think that I’m in this for his sake.” He scratched idly at his cheek, growing conspicuously more relaxed even as Mai’s shoulders knotted with tension. “I was actually pretty annoyed with him, once I got all caught up on the palace gossip. Loving and leaving a girl is all well and good – or so I hear – but not if she’s <em>my</em> girl.”</p><p>               Her father would have sacked him on the spot for that level of familiarity. “I’m not your anything.”</p><p>               “You’re my favorite student,” Lee corrected, and even now Mai couldn’t help the warm bubble of quickly-smothered pride that settled in her stomach at the words. Lee had never been any more generous in his praise than her parents were, and his standards had in some ways been just as exacting, but somehow she had never minded quite so much. Probably because he had allowed her to play with sharp objects as a child. “I’d say you’re like a daughter to me, but I was always led to believe that a child would feel some kind of filial duty toward her father and wouldn’t cause me so much trouble as you do.”</p><p><em>               She </em>caused <em>him</em> trouble. That was rich.</p><p>               “Talk to me,” he said, and she resented the way he said it, like she really was the child she had been when he had first put a practice target in front of her and he was attempting to coax her into some particularly onerous chore. She hadn’t needed that kind of cajoling even when she <em>had</em> still been a child. She’d never complained, never whined or thrown tantrums, although she was distantly considering throwing one now. Just a small one, as a calculated diversion. If she overturned the tea things and stamped her feet, maybe he’d stop trying to corner her. “It’s not like you to avoid something just because it’s unpleasant.” He did something brief and wry with his mouth that couldn’t quite be called a smile. “Not that I haven’t sometimes wished that you would.”</p><p>               Mai took a deep breath. “You’re making too much of nothing. I haven’t read the letter because there’s no point. Anything in there stopped being relevant a long time ago.”</p><p>               He snorted under his breath. “Months, Mai, not years. You’re not an old woman yet.”</p><p>               “I’m the only one in the room who isn’t. You meddle like someone’s aged granny. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been. Zuko is in the past for me. Leave him there.”</p><p>               “You’re here at his request.”</p><p>               “I’m here at the Fire Lord’s request,” she corrected him, even though she knew that it was ridiculous to insist on drawing a line between the two. Ridiculous but necessary. Zuko had abandoned her and left only that stupid letter as an explanation. Zuko had fought his sister and forced her to choose between the two of them. The Fire Lord was the one she had to answer to, and she couldn’t do that if she was busy sorting through the muddle that Zuko had left in his wake.</p><p>               Not that it should matter. Not that she should feel anything now. Perhaps—perhaps she had been hurt, but her mother’s teachings held strong. Anger and hurt were passions too costly to be afforded. They made a person act foolish and irrational, drove them to do things that would arouse comment in others.</p><p>               Lee cleared his throat. “I very much hope that I’m not the first to tell you this – breaking bad news gives me indigestion – but they’re the same person, Mai. If you’re angry at Zuko, then you’re angry at the Fire Lord.”</p><p>               “I’m not angry.” She didn’t sound angry. That was the important part. That had always been the important part. “I don’t understand why people keep assuming that I am.” Iroh, and now Lee. If her emotions had been any less under her control, she might have turned her head and glanced away, done something to avoid the too-knowing way he was looking at her. As it was, she met Lee’s eyes directly.</p><p>               “You must have felt something, Mai. Even you.” For the first time, she heard frustration clogging his voice, saw it in the press of his lips. It was nearly as well-concealed as her own, masked by slouched shoulders and a genial disregard for social niceties rather than Mai’s personal favorite of careful poise and expression so studiously blank that ice wouldn’t have melted on her cheek, but it was there.</p><p>               Deep, slow breaths. She wouldn’t lose her hard-earned calm, not over this. “Of course I did,” she said, her low and voice level. “Maybe I was angry. Maybe I was hurt that he could discard me so easily.” The words continued to bubble up past her lips, even when she would have stopped them. “Maybe I was terrified that he would go and get himself <em>killed</em>.” Another deep breath, and she managed to swallow the rest of what she wanted to say. The unsaid words scraped down her throat like glass. “It’s past. It’s not that I never felt those things, it’s that they don’t matter now.”</p><p>               “Mai—”</p><p>               “I should have known.” The broken-glass words came back up suddenly, oddly painless leaving her as they hadn’t been when she was keeping them contained. “Zuko was miserable while we were on Ember Island. He didn’t stop being miserable, even after we came back to the palace.” She sounded so matter-of-fact, as serenely indifferent as ever even though her usually ordered mind fallen to disarray. “I knew he was unhappy. I just didn’t think that he would actually <em>do</em> anything about it. I never—I don’t <em>act</em>, Lee. I react, and usually that’s enough. Because I would never try to change an uncomfortable situation, it didn’t occur to me that he might.” In spite of her earlier resolve, she found that she couldn’t quite look at Lee. “I suffer from a lack of imagination. That was – and is – my shortcoming, not his.”</p><p>               Lee was silent for a moment. Then he chuckled and reached a hand across the table. He rested his fingers against the top of her head with an easy affection that neither of her parents had ever shown. In a moment of weakness, Mai didn’t knock his hand away. “A lack of imagination.” He chuckled again. “Just read the letter, Mai. It’s been almost a year. How bad can it be, really?” He gulped down the last of his tea and didn’t so much stand from his chair as slide off of it in a way that suggested bones were an optional component of the human body, before leaving her to her solitary breakfast.</p><p>
  <em>               How bad can it be, really?</em>
</p><p>               Very.</p><p>               Maybe.</p><p>               She touched the letter with long, careful fingers. Then she sighed, mostly at herself, and unrolled the paper in one lightning-quick movement that would have served her better on the practice courts than it did in the sitting room.</p><p>
  <em>               Mai,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>               I’m sorry that you have to find out this way. A letter isn’t right, but I don’t think that telling you in person would be any better.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>               It's weird, leaving again. It’s weird to think about what I’ll be taking with me. When my father first banished me, I took my uncle and my hunger to return, and not much else. I didn't think on you much. Maybe, somewhere in the back of my mind, you were one of the things I wanted to come back to, but mostly you were just one of my sister's friends who made the times I was forced to play with her a little more tolerable.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>               All of that has changed. Now my banishment is self-imposed. My uncle might not want to go with me this time, and I don’t have any desire to return unless my father is no longer the one sitting on the throne. I’ll probably think about you more than I should.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>               I don't expect you to understand. I'll be a traitor in truth this time, and you'll probably hate me for it. I hope that you don't, but I can't take that into consideration now. For once, I've made a choice without the influence of my father, my uncle, my sister; I have to follow through.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>               I'm sorry. I never said it, but I care about you, too. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>               I'll come back. I promise, I'll come back.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>               Goodbye.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>               Zuko</em>
</p><p>               Mai wished that she hadn’t read it.</p><p>               She’d thought that she had moved past all this. Even seeing Zuko again hadn’t been enough to bring it to the surface. What faint twinges she had felt—well, she was patient. She would have waited them out, let them disappear in their own time. This letter made her remember everything he had been before he had joined the Avatar and taken the throne: awkward and inarticulate and passionate and so blazingly <em>stupid</em> at times that it made her want to scream but <em>real</em> and, for a time, hers.</p><p>               She had <em>loved</em> him. She thought that she still might, even after months of trying forget the name of the feeling caught half-painful at the base of her throat.</p><p>               What was she supposed to do with that now?</p><p>               Someone else in her position might have cried. Since she denied herself that release, Mai touched the letter to the low burner set beneath the teapot to keep it warm and watched as the paper blackened and crumbled in her hand. The seal bubbled and ran down the curled edge of the page, leaving red smears of wax on the spotless table. When the flames crackled close enough to her fingertips to hurt, she let what was left of the scroll drop into her half empty teacup. It smoldered sullenly for a moment before going out.</p><p>               Once she had tired of watching the ashes float around the inside of the teacup, staining smooth white porcelain with black soot, she got up and went to see Iroh.</p><p>               He was in the midst of enjoying his own morning tea when he let her into his rooms. She didn’t protest when he poured her a cup, but she also didn’t drink from it.</p><p>               “The tea isn’t to your liking?”</p><p><em>               I don’t care</em>. Courtesy, drilled into her over and over again for years, forced her to take a sip. “The tea is fine.”</p><p>               “Good, good.”</p><p>               “I need you to arrange passage into the Earth Kingdom for me.”</p><p>               Iroh paused with his cup midway to his lips. “Already?”</p><p>               “I’ve found something that bears further investigation,” she said.</p><p>               Watching Iroh think was interesting, at least. She could almost see him consider and discard any number of excuses. This was, after all, why she had been asked to return to the capital in the first place.</p><p>               “When would you like to leave?”</p><p>               “Tomorrow.”</p><p>               He was silent for a long time. “Very well. I will arrange for passage on a ship and enough Earth Kingdom currency to see you through anything you might find once you dock. You will leave tomorrow morning.”</p><p>               “Thank you.” She sighed as he looked at her with gently arched brows, but she had gotten everything else that she wanted out of this conversation, so it was hard not to feel victorious even as she caved to his expectant silence and added, “Uncle Iroh.”</p><p> </p><p>**</p><p> </p><p>               Lee helped Mai pack rather than allowing one of the servants to do it. He did so without commenting on the letter, her sudden departure, or all of the myriad ways in which manual labor would inevitably lead him to contract the plague or experience fatigue or bleed from the ears. He took her out to the practice courts once her bags were packed and worked her until her muscles screamed with exertion and she was ready to collapse on the spot. She called him <em>Master Lee </em>when she bid him goodnight, the first time she had done so since she was a child. He smiled a little when she did. Some days it felt like she could fill books with all the things she didn’t know about her old teacher, but she did know that this was the closest that either of them were really capable of coming to an apology. That night, Mai slept soundly.</p><p>               Morning came too soon, but for once she wasn’t tempted by the prospect of languishing in bed until morning departed again. She got dressed and slipped into the room that served as Tom-Tom’s nursery. Mai did not kiss him goodbye or tenderly touch his cheek, but she watched the deep even breaths that he took as he slept, peaceful and quiet now as he never was while he was awake. She found Ming blocking the door when she turned to go. Ming’s hair was rumpled and there was a mark from the pillow still glowing an angry red against the skin of her cheek, but her shoulders were held tense and ready and her eyes were alert. Mai was content. No one would enter her brother’s room while he slept, not without his new nurse’s notice.</p><p>               Iroh did not accompany her to the docks, and she was resigned and not at all surprised to find Zuko waiting there for her when she arrived.</p><p>               He took her bag, filled not with her own belongings but the clothes and personal items of a well-heeled Earth Kingdom woman, and she let him. The air smelled like salt and the cries of the pelican-gulls blurred together with the laughter and shouts of disembarking sailors as she and Zuko walked side-by-side down the long length of the pier. It seemed to her that his letter had crawled under her skin and shredded all of her carefully maintained distance, because suddenly all she could think about was what it had been like to stand closer to him, without a foot and a half of cautious space between her arm and his. There had been a time when it had been easy as breathing to let him step into her space and twist his fingers through hers, or for her to nudge him in the ribs and catch his eye when the blowhard husband of one of his father’s ministers said something particularly foolish. Mai had never come close to laughing, but Zuko wasn’t known for his self-restraint. More than once she had watched his eye twitch with the effort of keeping his face unreadable enough not to offend after a well-timed elbow or a significantly raised eyebrow.</p><p>               Memory was a powerful intoxicant. For just a moment, her palm itched with the desire to reach out and touch him.</p><p>               She didn’t.</p><p>               They reached the end of the pier. He had set sail from this very port when they had barely been more than children, and she had not been there to see him off. Her parents had forbidden it. The irony of their role reversal was not lost on her, and she wondered how it would feel to be gone for two years. Maybe if she stayed away for long enough, she wouldn’t feel anything at all when she looked at Zuko. That was what usually happened with infatuation. It burned out when there was nothing new to feed it. Even as she had the thought, she found that she didn’t really believe it.</p><p>               “You were going to leave without telling me,” he said, and she could hear the accusation in his voice. The urge to touch him returned, stronger than ever, but slapping the Fire Lord was almost certainly a breach of her mother’s rules about etiquette.</p><p>               “You’re one to talk,” Mai said, and the words might as well have been a slap from the way that he flinched when she said them.</p><p>               The flinch was satisfying but she almost wished that she hadn’t said the words. His absence and her coldness had formed a gap between them, and she didn’t know how to bridge it. It was an odd thing to realize that she might want to.</p><p>               “I’m <em>sorry</em>, all right?” Zuko didn’t shout, but he was still loud enough to startle a protesting squawk from the nearest pelican-gull and startle it into taking wing. He winced, as quick to regret as he was to anger, and she ducked her head to avoid showing the little smile that flickered across her lips. “I tried to tell you that. In my letter.”</p><p>               “It was an idiotic letter,” Mai said promptly. She doubted many things, but this was not one of them.</p><p>               “<em>I know</em>,” Zuko snarled, but it was clear now that his anger wasn’t for her. He seemed to realize only belatedly that he had stepped closer as he spoke, his head now bowed over hers. Panic flashed briefly across his face, and he took a quick pace back. “I know.”</p><p>               Mai watched him go. She weighed her options, but any warrior knew when to press an advantage rather that retreating. She took a calculated step forward. Zuko didn’t move again. “What do you <em>want</em>, Zuko? My forgiveness?”</p><p>               “I thought,” he said, measured in a way that she knew didn’t come naturally to him, “that I might have that already.”</p><p>               On the day that the Avatar had defeated Fire Lord Ozai, the nursery that they had played in as children had been blackened by fire, small beds and chairs long since outgrown reduced to so much tinder and ash. She had followed the smell of electricity and burnt feather mattresses through the wing of the palace where the royal family was quartered until she had found them: brother in sister, locked in the kind of confrontation that only one of them would survive. She had watched them unnoticed. She hadn’t realized there was a knife in her hand until it had skimmed past her fingers. She hadn’t known who her target was. She thought that she hadn’t known.</p><p>               Even now, she would swear that she didn’t remember all of Ty Lee’s excited, rambling explanations of pressure points and anatomy, that she had tuned them out the same way she had a long childhood full of chatter about the boys and girls Ty Lee liked and complaints about whichever of her siblings currently had the hippo-lion’s share of Ty Lee’s ire. She must have remembered enough. Azula’s arm had fallen to her side, bleeding and suddenly useless where Mai’s blade had ravaged tendon and muscle, the damage beyond even a waterbender’s ability to heal.</p><p>               She thought that she hadn’t known, but that was a lie. Never had there been any doubt about who had her loyalty, not really, not even after Zuko had left and she had been left with his sister.</p><p>               “Not an unreasonable assumption, I suppose.”</p><p>               Only Zuko, she reflected, would take that kind of non-answer as encouragement. His hand hovered for a moment outstretched before his fingers came to rest lightly against the side of her neck, over the spot where her pulse thundered beneath her skin. Even so simple a touch made her shiver and shot lightning straight down her spine to pool somewhere near the pit of her stomach. It was like the rush of a fight but better, so much better, comfortable and familiar and strange all at the same time. When he leaned in to press his mouth against her temple, she held her breath and stood perfectly still.</p><p>               “You’re an idiot,” she reiterated to distract from the pounding of her heart. “I expect you to be less of one when I come back.”</p><p>               “When you come back?” he asked roughly. His breath was warm and his upper lip caught on her skin as he spoke. </p><p>               She nodded once and stepped away from him, because she no longer trusted her own impulses. She had never been much controlled by them, but there was a first time for everything, and she knew now that there were consequences for rushing to follow where Zuko led. Wars had been won. A crown had been lost. Nations had—well, not crumbled, although the most cynical part of her thought <em>give it time</em>.</p><p>               Zuko let her go, fingers unresisting when she plucked her bag from his hand.</p><p>               “We’ll see,” she said.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Updates are on Thursdays now I guess, haha.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Chapter 9</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>              The crew of the ship averted their eyes when they saw Mai, as if not looking directly at her or acknowledging her presence her would allow them to deny that they had carried an unregistered passenger from the Fire Nation to the Earth Kingdom. All of them were well bribed, no doubt. The flag the ship sailed under was familiar in a way she couldn’t quite place: a winged boar on a field of black and Earth Kingdom green. When she stepped into the main hold long enough to change into the less conspicuous clothing Iroh had given her and found only an insufficient screen made of stretched canvas that also served to conceal the latrine, she was suddenly grateful for the careful inattention of the crew. She hadn’t quite scraped the grimace from her face by the time she made it back above board. The captain immediately approached her and asked that she retire to the room that had been made ready for her; apparently, she was a distraction.</p>
<p>              She agreed, more out of distaste for her surroundings than out of any consideration for him. The thought of solitude comforted her. What she found when she was shown to her quarters did not.</p>
<p>              “Hello,” Iroh said, and beamed at her. “Would you like some tea?”</p>
<p>              A lesser woman might have sputtered. Zuko would have shouted. Mai settled on the cushion across from him, poured herself some tea, wished idly for something stronger, and summoned all of the monumental restraint and composure within her before she said, “General Iroh. This is a surprise.” She thought that her flat tone successfully conveyed that this was understating matters significantly.</p>
<p>              “Ah, yes. I suppose you would like an explanation.”</p>
<p>              Mai just looked at him.</p>
<p>              “As I was arranging for you to travel to the Earth Kingdom, I realized that it had been <em>such</em> a long time since I had a <em>vacation</em>. Fire Nation politics are so <em>tiring</em> for an old man like me. And I thought, what could be better than a nice trip to the Earth Kingdom with a beautiful lady to keep me company?” He glanced at her hopefully.</p>
<p>              Mai refused to be charmed. Or to dignify such a comment with a response.</p>
<p>              “Besides,” Iroh continued, “I love boats. Did you know, the captain said that we could have a music night tomorrow? He thought that it would be very relaxing for the crew. Such a nice man. This is his cabin, you know. They don’t usually take passengers, so there are no private rooms on the ship save his, but he said he couldn’t bear the thought of an old man and a delicate young flower shivering in the hammocks with the crew or curled up on the hard floor of the hold with the cargo.”</p>
<p>              Mai wondered how Iroh could get tea, music night, and the <em>captain’s quarters</em> within an hour of arriving onboard, when she couldn’t even get a civil word. She thought that she might hate him a little.</p>
<p>              Mai sighed.</p>
<p>              Her sigh had not been meant as approval for Iroh’s scheme, but it was clear that he was choosing to take it as such. Mai considered the possibility that reading any response from her as encouragement was a family trait.</p>
<p>              “Good, good. I am sure that we will have an excellent time.” Iroh sipped his tea and refilled her cup without asking. “Now, would you like to play a game of pai sho with me?”</p>
<p>              “Not really.”</p>
<p>              She wasn’t particularly surprised when he set the game up anyway. She accepted the bag of pieces that he gave her without further protest, selecting which of the small ceramic tiles she would use with the same care that she gave any plan of attack. When they both had their tiles arranged on the board, the game began.</p>
<p>              “We should have a wager,” Iroh said, as Mai’s long fingers slid one of her tiles a few places to the left.</p>
<p>              Mai made a noncommittal noise, but she was interested in spite of herself. “Money?”</p>
<p>              “Oh, no,” Iroh said. “If you win, I will board another ship as soon as we reach Earth Kingdom soil and return to the Fire Nation.”</p>
<p>              She couldn’t deny that it was a tempting prospect. “And if you win?”</p>
<p>              Iroh considered. “A kiss,” he said gallantly.</p>
<p>              He was ridiculous. She rolled her eyes but after a moment’s deliberation she agreed.</p>
<p>              They were well matched, although she could tell from the start that he was the better player. She was more ruthless, heedlessly sacrificing pieces to gain the advantage, but the way he played baffled her. Mai had never been very good at guessing at people’s motives when they were anything more complex than blind ambition or loyalty or avarice, but when motive was reduced simply to the desire to win then tactics were remarkably easy to untangle, and even as a child she’d had a marked gift for anticipating her opponents and playing the long game.</p>
<p>              She couldn’t anticipate Iroh. He slid forward when she would have retreated, passed on his turn at times when she, had she been in his position, would have pressed an advantage. Once or twice he spared a piece of hers from the pot for no reason she could discern. His patience outlasted her own as he slowly chased her around the board, gained points for himself, and finally drove her into a corner. She moved to escape from the trap he had so carefully built and found the last of her tiles removed from the board when his white lotus skipped forward to take it, having sat, forgotten until now, on the exact same spot where he had placed it at the start of the game.</p>
<p>              “It would seem that I owe you a kiss,” Mai said, as he packed away the tiles and the game board.</p>
<p>              “I think I’ll save it for later,” Iroh said. He poured another cup of tea from the now-cold pot and blew warmth onto the pale amber liquid on it before handing it steaming to her. “That was a delightful game. I wonder why you don’t play more often.”</p>
<p>              The third time Mai had beaten Azula at pai sho, the princess had lowered her lashes and calmly pushed the game off the table. Three of the little tiles had been crushed under the weight of the board, another one broken in two. The set had been a gift from Mai’s uncle, who was strange and whose talk about the prison he ran disturbed and fascinated Mai by turns, but who was never boring and believed in the importance of family strongly enough to gather her in a bone-crushing hug every time her saw her, even under his sister’s disapproving gaze.</p>
<p>              “I suppose I outgrew it,” Mai said, and took a languid sip of her tea to hide anything that her face or her voice might have failed to conceal. “Games are for children.”</p>
<p>              “Ah, but pai sho more than just a game.”</p>
<p>              They lapsed into silence. The next evening, she stolidly refused to accompany him to the music night he had arranged with the crew.</p>
<p>              “You have beautiful hands,” Iroh told her. “Are you sure that you don’t play an instrument? The shamisen perhaps, or the flute?”</p>
<p>              Every girl who attended the Academy learned to play, which he undoubtedly knew as well as she did. Music was an acceptable pursuit for a young woman of good breeding, as long as she played with precision and grace and little passion. Mai had quickly lost interest in the skill once she had mastered it.</p>
<p>              “No.”</p>
<p>              He left and she remained in the cabin, lounging on the same lumpy cushion she had occupied for the better part of her waking hours over the last two days, when Iroh’s bustling presence made whiling away the hours with sleep impossible. Even from the cabin she could hear the music. A voice she thought must be Iroh’s voice lifted in song, wavering over the high notes and rough with age but still strong and oddly beautiful.</p>
<p>              By the time she woke on the third day Iroh had already gone to play pai sho with some of the crew. He returned with what had to be the weekly earnings of three or four Earth Kingdom sailors. Mai spent the afternoon hours idly flicking her darts at the far end of the cabin, leaving notches in the otherwise smooth wood. She went to bed early, claiming the room’s only bed. Somehow Iroh had gotten it the previous two nights, and she had ended up sleeping on a pile of cushions on the floor.</p>
<p>              They reached port on their fourth day at sea. Even though he had apparently been robbing them blind at pai sho for the duration of the voyage, the crew bid Iroh a tearful goodbye. When they broke into an off-key rendition of some silly song involving loving and losing a woman for every season, Mai went to wait on the dock and pretended that she couldn’t still hear their caterwauling from twenty feet away. Iroh joined her shortly thereafter, smiling and wiping away his own tears.</p>
<p>              “Are you ready to go?” Mai asked him, her tone implying that he had better be.</p>
<p>              Iroh was staring into the middle distance behind her, and Mai fought not to be annoyed. “General Iroh?”</p>
<p>              “Ah, yes. I made some travel arrangements for us. Maybe I should have warned you about—.”</p>
<p>              Before he could finish saying what he <em>undoubtedly should have warned her about</em>, Mai found herself enveloped in a very—<em>pink</em>—hug.</p>
<p>              “Mai!” Ty Lee exclaimed. She said it a little too loudly and a little too close, and Mai’s ears rang with the sound of her own name. “I’m so happy to see you!”</p>
<p>              Mai fought and succeeded at keeping her surprise off her face as she turned within the circle of Ty Lee’s arms. She had once complained that Ty Lee’s hugs most closely resembled the death grip of an orangutan-boa. That being the case, she wasn’t certain why she found it so pleasant to have Ty Lee squeezing her hard enough that she would undoubtedly need to have her dresses remade to accommodate a smaller waistline, or why she wrapped her own arms around Ty Lee’s back in a decidedly more delicate embrace. “It has been a while, hasn’t it?” she asked, and was equally unsure what to make of the quiet emotion in her own voice. She sounded like a stranger, no longer cool and composed, but—surely she could be happy to see Ty Lee, who she had never thought to see again. She could allow herself that. More softly, so that Iroh wouldn’t hear, she said, “I’m happy to see you, too.”</p>
<p>              Ty Lee smiled. She should smile. She knew better than anyone what such an admission had cost Mai.</p>
<p>              “We’re going to be traveling together again! Isn’t that <em>wonderful</em>? My circus is going to be your cover so that you make it to Omashu without anyone knowing. The Fire Lord even said he would grant me a pardon for all that running around we did with Azula.” Only Ty Lee would talk about conquering the most important city in the Earth Kingdom like it was a fun little outing between friends. “Take away my banishment in return for services to the crown, something like that.” She drew back and smiled again at Mai. “Not that I’ll go back! But it would be nice to be able to visit my sisters, I guess. And you.”</p>
<p>              There were times when Ty Lee spoke and all Mai heard was <em>la la la la la, I’m so pretty</em>. This, however, caught her attention. She looked over her shoulder at Iroh, and he inclined his head slightly in confirmation.</p>
<p>              “You consider the circus an inconspicuous way of traveling?” she asked him.</p>
<p>              “Well, no one will look for us there.”</p>
<p>              Mai wished for something against which to bang her head. She settled for leaning forward until she could rest her forehead on Ty Lee’s shoulder, which had the added advantage of sparing her from having to look at either of them. Ty Lee smelled like magnolias and sandalwood, the same perfume she had worn since she had first filched a half-empty bottle from her eldest sister’s vanity table when they were twelve.</p>
<p>              “How did you know that the circus was going to Omashu?”</p>
<p>              “Oh,” Ty Lee said with a giggle, “it’s not, but I don’t think that will be a problem.”</p>
<p>              The reason why became apparent when Ty Lee led them into the circle of brightly colored tents set up right off the pier and was immediately gathered into the arms of a muscular young Earth Kingdom man with an unmistakable air of infatuation. That didn’t startle Mai; people were always falling in love with pretty, lively Ty Lee. What made her pause was the answering softness on Ty Lee’s face. Perhaps there was more than one reason why she was unwilling to return to the Fire Nation. The last time Mai had seen Ty Lee look at someone like that, it had been—.</p>
<p>              Better not to think about that.</p>
<p>              “This is Huan,” Ty Lee said. “He took over the circus after his father died a few months ago.”</p>
<p>              “The war?” Iroh asked, his expression sympathetic.</p>
<p>              Huan’s dusky cheeks turned bright red, and he mumbled something that could have been <em>angry tigress</em> or <em>jealous mistress</em>. Iroh wisely decided not to ask for clarification.</p>
<p>              “This is Iroh,” Ty Lee said. “And this is Mai. She’s my best friend in the whole wide world, even if her aura <em>is</em> a dingy gray.” She eyed the air around Mai’s head with displeasure, as if a frown could alter the color of the aura she was seeing. Or not seeing, as Mai was inclined to believe.</p>
<p>              Huan held out his hand but, once he had Mai’s fingers wrapped firmly in his own, he seemed nervously uncertain about whether he was supposed shake her hand or kiss her knuckles. He attempted to do both and ended up thumping her fist against his broad, muscular chest, at which point Mai extracted her hand from his grasp and refused to give it back. His cheeks had turned an even more brilliant shade of red, and he quickly excused himself to go see to some urgent circus business. A woman covered in sparkling green sequins and not much else arrived soon after to show Iroh where he would be sleeping. Mai couldn’t really blame him for following her without any kind of protest at being separated from his traveling companion.</p>
<p>              “I’ll show you where to put your things,” Ty Lee said. She hooked a knee back and over her shoulder in that absent way that Mai would never admit she had missed. “You can stay in my tent!”</p>
<p>              “Won’t that cut in on your time with Huan?” Mai asked as she tried not to imagine long nights of hair braiding and toenail painting and very little sleep on the road to Omashu.</p>
<p>              Ty Lee giggled. “We’ll find a way, don’t you worry. He’s cute, isn’t he?”</p>
<p>              Mai made a vague noise that might be interpreted as agreement.</p>
<p>              “Strong as an ox, too. He can toss me ten feet in the air and catch me, all without breaking a sweat.”</p>
<p>              “Thrilling.”</p>
<p>              “And he’s <em>so</em> smart. He was at the University in Ba Sing Se. He only came back after his father died because we needed someone to run the circus.”</p>
<p>              Privately, Mai wondered if his real reason for returning was that he had flunked out. “You really like him, don’t you?” <em>Does he know about Azula? </em>hovered on her tongue, but she didn’t say it. Even she knew better than to put a dent that size in Ty Lee’s joy.</p>
<p>              She was reminded once again that the woman in front of her knew her better than almost anyone else did when Ty Lee said, “Azula was—well, there isn’t else anyone like her.” Ty Lee let go of her leg and brought her foot back to the ground. She smiled weakly. “That’s probably for the best, isn’t it? I really don’t think the world could have handled two of her. I really liked her, but she—she was never very <em>nice</em> to me. I like Huan, and he <em>is </em>nice to me. He makes my aura all pink. Really, really pink. I like the person <em>I</em> am when I’m around him. Do you understand?”</p>
<p>              Mai understood—too much. Ty Lee had moved on, like it was just that simple. Maybe it was. Some days it seemed like everyone was moving on, everyone except Mai, her feet still planted in the past and the rest of her deeply unconvinced that stepping forward was the safest course of action, but equally aware that no one was going to wait forever for a dingy gray <em>blah</em> to catch up.</p>
<p>              “I suppose,” Mai gritted her teeth, “that I can like him too.” Really, he had given Mai no reason <em>not</em> to like him. All of his awkwardness and apparent shyness aside, he seemed eager to please and very taken with Ty Lee. He wasn’t what she would have wanted, but—.</p>
<p>              Ty Lee threw her arms around Mai’s neck and gave her a squeeze. “Not all of us want princes and crowns, Mai,” she murmured in Mai’s ear, and it was becoming uncanny how well she could read Mai when Mai was certain that she was giving nothing away. “Or—princesses, I guess.” There was a sly smile in Ty Lee’s voice, and Mai knew that the correction was an afterthought; her friend had said <em>exactly</em> what she had meant to say. “I’m happy here. Be happy for me?”</p>
<p>              “I am,” Mai said. That much was true.</p>
<p>              “I missed you so much,” Ty Lee said, and that seemed true too. Mai didn’t respond, but she also didn’t protest when Ty Lee released her only long enough to take her hand and led her further into the brightly colored world of the circus.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. Chapter 10</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Some notes ahead of this chapter!</p><p>1) Small CW for murder and violence. Nothing particularly gory and it's in the tags, but I like to warn for these things. I don't know why I was convinced at twenty that every fic needed a murder mystery, but that's where we're at.<br/>2) I have a bad habit of setting my rating higher than it probably needs to be out of an abundance of caution, but I will, by gum, earn my slightly spicy M on this fic.<br/>3) The chapter after this one was half written in the late aughts but has never seen the light of day, so that's exciting! Moving on to that new new content soon!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>               There was a weight settled low on Zuko’s hips, keeping him pinned to a bed that still felt too soft even months after he had last slept on the ground or the hard leather of Appa’s saddle. He opened his eyes and was less surprised that he should have been to find Mai stooped over him. She smelled like smoke and salt and skin and that made a strange kind of sense too, because she was dressed as she had been during their last disastrous visit to Ember Island, her split skirt ruched up around her thighs where they straddled his hips.</p><p>               They hadn’t done anything like this on Ember Island. He had been jealous and she had been angry. There hadn’t been—they hadn’t had the chance. He skimmed his palms over her thighs. He didn’t question why the skirt and the narrow pants he could remember her wearing beneath it were suddenly gone, not when he had soft, smooth skin beneath his palms. She shivered when his questing fingers found the edge of her ribs.</p><p>               Her hands rested shoulders, holding him down, pushing him deeper into the soft embrace of the mattress. She leaned further forward, the ends of her hair pooling against his chest, and he strained up to meet her. The annoyance on her face was pure Mai, and he allowed himself to be manhandled back onto the sheets. His head dropped back against the pillow and he forced his breathing even. His eyes slipped shut.</p><p>               Her lips brushed the edge of his jaw, and he tilted his head back to give her better access. Some of the tension he hadn’t even realized he was carrying leeched out of his spine. It felt good to just lie here and let her touch him, let her take charge.</p><p>               “Am I <em>boring</em> you?” she asked, cool and amused. Her teeth scraped the skin over his collarbone, just hard enough to sting. His eyes flew open and he lost the steady rhythm of his own breathing as she worried the skin there. One of her hands left his shoulder, trailing languidly over his chest until he felt the playful scrape of her nails across his abdomen.</p><p>               Waking up was a significant letdown.</p><p>               His body aching and his temper rising, Zuko registered the pounding on his door. The pale slant of sunlight through his window, as familiar to him as the regular pulse of his own blood, told him that it had only been a few short hours since he had tumbled, exhausted, into bed. With murder on his mind, Zuko rolled out of bed and stormed across the room to jerk open the door.</p><p><em>               “What?”</em> he snarled. Lieutenant Jee, now Captain Jee and the leader of Zuko’s own personal guard, did not look sufficiently impressed. Zuko’s scowl deepened.</p><p>               “Fire Lord,” Jee said, and even through the lingering haze of sleep Zuko realized that Jee was pale, and that he would not be knocking if it wasn’t a matter of some urgency, since he had been the one guarding that same door when Zuko had slumped through it an hour before dawn.</p><p>               He woke up very quickly after that. He rubbed the last of the sleep from his eyes. “What’s gone wrong now?”</p><p>               “I really think you should see it for yourself,” Jee said. He shifted one foot from the other and this, more than anything else, was what told Zuko that the problem was not one of the more routine emergencies that might have driven Jee to wake him. Jee wasn’t a green soldier. He was unmoved by Zuko’s temper and rarely shaken by anything else. If he was fidgeting, then something had gone desperately wrong. What he said next was really just confirmation. “The new delegate from the Earth Kingdom is dead.”</p><p>               Zuko’s reaction to Jee’s words was immediate. In less than a minute, Zuko had shrugged into a robe and was following Jee down the corridor, hair unbound and a pillow mark still creasing his cheek, royal dignity abandoned in favor of potential diplomatic disaster. “I suppose it’s too much to hope for that he died quietly in his sleep of natural causes?” He already suspected what answer he would receive. Even in times of peace, the Fire Nation could be a dangerous place; Zuko had beat the previous record holder for <em>most Agni Kais fought by a Fire Lord during his first year on the throne</em> in the first two months after his coronation, and Jee’s people had some kind of betting pool over who could foil the most assassination attempts in a given week. Sota was the current favorite, but Zuko had money on Xiulan. The war was over, but Zuko’s rule had so far been anything but calm.</p><p>               Jee looked remarkably composed, but he was still pale under his tan. “I think that we can safely rule out natural causes, Fire Lord.” They entered the corridor where diplomats and other important guests were housed and, after a brief glance over his shoulder at Zuko, Jee pushed open a door.</p><p>               The walls were splattered with blood.</p><p>               Zuko paused on the threshold. With all he had seen, the things he had done, he still wasn’t entirely inured to the sight of violence, especially when it was smeared across the pretty wallpaper that his mother had chosen to decorate these rooms during the last year of Azulon’s rule. The room was crawling with soldiers, however, and Zuko had learned not to show weakness in front of so large an audience long before he had ever been crowned. He squared his shoulders, lifted his head, and stepped into the room. “Report.”</p><p>               “A palace maid found him when she came in to build up the fire this morning,” Jee said.</p><p>               “Where is she now?”</p><p>               “With one of my men. She’s—very shaken by the experience.”</p><p>               “I’ll want to talk to her.”</p><p>               “Understood.”</p><p>               Having taken in the room, Zuko forced his attention to the man – the body – sitting in a chair beside the fireplace. His throat had been sliced open. There were no other visible wounds, and it seemed impossible to Zuko that so much blood had come from such a thin little cut. There was a book in his hands, open. He’d clearly had no time to react, let alone fight.</p><p>               Tyro. His name was Tyro. Having a name for the body made it worse, as did the memory of Tyro’s steady, patient refusal to be offended when Zuko had been unable to clear his schedule to spend much time with the newly-appointed Earth Kingdom delegate after his arrival. <em>We’ll have plenty opportunity to get to know each other</em>, Tyro had said, and having someone he had to please who didn’t take immediate exception to something Zuko had said or done had been an enormous relief.</p><p>               It was a real shame that Tyro had been wrong. It was a an even greater shame that Zuko couldn’t take the time to mourn what little he had known about the man, that he instead had to let himself be guided by the gnawing urgency of the dilemma presented by his death. “We have to find out who did this,” Zuko said. He pushed a weary hand back through his hair and purposefully did not look away from what remained of the Earth Kingdom’s first ambassador to the Fire Nation in over a hundred years.</p><p>               “Probably not a professional job,” said a grotesquely cheerful voice from the door. “<em>Much</em> too messy.”</p><p>               Zuko’s snapped around to face the voice, even as two of his soldiers moved the bar the door against the man standing there, their movements already jittery sharp with nerves. Zuko had to peer around two sets of broad shoulders in order to identify who had spoken.</p><p>               Mai’s bodyguard. She had left him behind when she had departed for the Earth Kingdom, and Zuko had seen him several times in the past few days, wearing the distinct air of poodle-monkey abandoned by its owner and drifting listlessly around the palace – including a few parts of the palace where he definitely should <em>not</em> have been, but by the time Zuko approached him by the turtleduck pond to demand an explanation, he had been long gone. Now he was standing in the hallway outside of a murdered man’s room, an entirely inappropriate smile on his face and far too relaxed for someone being menaced by two hulking Fire Nation soldiers.</p><p>               “Let him in.” When the soldiers moved to do his bidding, Zuko focused sharp eyes on the man. “Explain—.” He trailed off when he realized he didn’t actually remember a name to go with the face.</p><p>               “Lee.” He entered the room, glancing around once before turning his gaze not to Zuko, but to the body beside the fireplace. He gestured at Tyro like a circus conjurer performing a trick. “Just as I said. Oh, a knife to the throat is good enough for a dark alley, I guess, if you have no <em>imagination</em>, no <em>panache</em>,” Zuko cleared his throat impatiently, and Lee hurriedly returned to his point, “but in the palace, where there are people in every corridor at all times? Lady Mai’s rooms aren’t far from here, so I can tell you without looking that the windows lead to a very pleasant courtyard with absolutely no easy escape routes.” His tone implied that he considered the lack of easy escape routes a personal affront. Given his disappearing act by the pond in the Fire Lord’s own personal courtyard, Zuko had to wonder what kind of escape route did qualify as <em>easy.</em> “Whoever killed him would have had to get <em>out</em> as well as in, and that’s hard to do if people notice that you’ve got blood all over you. Cutting someone open like that is messy, and the mess just gets everywhere. There are cleaner ways to kill a man.”</p><p>               Zuko felt his stomach turn over. Killing was one thing, if it was on a battlefield or during an Agni Kai. That was bad enough. But the kind of killing that Lee spoke of so matter-of-factly, a knife in the dark without even the honor of a duel behind it, was—disturbing. Zuko forced himself to focus on what Lee had said. “Maybe they washed away the blood before leaving.”</p><p>               “Maybe. They could have packed in a spare set of clothing, washed up here, and left without anyone being the wiser, but,” Lee moved into the room, and tilted the porcelain basin in one corner on its stand until the clear, clean water inside nearly spilled out, “I don’t think so.” He stooped, squinting into the ornamental pitcher shaped like a dragon that sat neatly on the bottom shelf of the basin’s stand. “Pitcher is full, too. I can’t think of any reason why someone would go through the trouble of refilling it to hide their presence here, not when they left <em>that</em> for you to find.” He gestured to Tyro again, more sedately this time.</p><p>               “How do you know all this?”</p><p>               Lee shrugged. “I used to serve in the Fire Lord’s army.”</p><p>               “You were no soldier,” Zuko said, as sure of that as he was of anything.</p><p>               “No.” Lee smirked at Zuko, as if he was <em>daring</em> him to ask the next obvious question. He stepped over to the window, his movements stiff, obviously favoring one of his legs over the other. Zuko watched him through narrowed eyes.</p><p>               “You will tell me everything you know of the matter.”</p><p>               “Ask me nicely.”</p><p>               Zuko’s vision blurred, and he felt an angry outburst such as he had not indulged in for months building in his chest. Before his temper could get the best of him, Lee continued. “I don’t really know any more than you do. Well—there is one thing. Just a tiny little clue that makes me think that this is personal rather than professional.” He twitched aside the tapestry beside the window, revealing a hastily scrawled word on the papered wall.</p><p>
  <em>               Traitor.</em>
</p><p>               “Nice touch,” Lee said, his expression as serenely indifferent as his voice had been earlier. “There’s an overturned inkwell on the floor over there. Did your friend in the chair have any enemies?”</p><p>               “He was a former Earth Kingdom rebel in the heart of the Fire Nation. Where would you like me to begin the list?” Zuko resisted the urge to run his hands over his face. His aborted fit of temper still throbbed in his wrists. He was tired. He was worried. He desperately needed to get out of this room, but was yet to figure out how to do so without it seeming like he was running away. “You said that whoever did this wouldn’t have been able to leave without being spotted. I think Captain Jee would have told me if someone had been apprehended wandering the palace covered in blood.” He glanced at the man in question, who tilted his head in wry confirmation.</p><p>               Lee’s eyes gleamed. “An interesting problem, isn’t it? A professional assassin <em>wouldn’t</em>, and no other person <em>could</em>.”</p><p>               Zuko stared at him.</p><p>               “What do you want us to do, Fire Lord?” one of the soldiers asked. Apparently he had been silent for too long, or else they were just worried that he would lay the blame for supposedly letting a blood-drenched murderer leave the scene of the crime unseen at their feet.</p><p>               “Remove the body. He’ll have to be returned to the Earth Kingdom, but for now—” he quickly turned over the available options in his head. “For now, send him to the temple within the palace. Discover what you can from the body, but be respectful. Then leave him in the care of the Fire Sages.” His uncle, and probably not a few of his subjects, would have been dismayed to know that his care for Tyro’s remains had more to do with not wanting to exacerbate what was already going to be a difficult situation with the Earth Kingdom than it did with respect for the deceased. He thought that Mai might have approved. He could almost hear her now. <em>Bad enough, without having to worry that you’re going to be accused of some quaint little form of Earth Kingdom body desecration.</em></p><p>               Actually, his uncle and subjects probably would have been perfectly warranted in their dismay. With effort, he dragged his mind back to a more compassionate bent and gathered the dignity of his office around him. “I will see personally to informing the Earth King and any family he might have about this unfortunate turn of events.”</p><p>               “Yes, being dead is generally considered unfortunate,” Lee muttered. Zuko tried hard not to snarl and mostly succeeded.</p><p>               “Leave,” he said to Lee.</p><p>               The infuriating man did so, but not so quickly that his parting commentary didn’t drift back to Zuko’s ears. “Dear sir, madam, or otherwise. I regret to inform you that your brother, father, cousin, and/or son has become a very unfortunate event—.” His voice faded as he shut the door behind him.</p><p>               “I could have him killed,” Jee offered. Zuko couldn’t tell if he was serious or not.</p><p>               “No. Thank you. That’s not necessary.”</p><p>               “Not <em>necessary</em>.”</p><p>               Well—. “No.”</p><p>               Jee didn’t argue with him. Zuko liked Jee very much for not arguing with him, or attempting to turn a murder that was also a pending diplomatic emergency into a performance worthy of the stage. “Orders?”</p><p>               “I’ll speak to the maid now.”</p><p>               Jee nodded and once again led Zuko down the hall, this time into a nearby room. It was another suite, nearly identical to Tyro’s but not currently in use by any guest. There was a soldier posted near the door and a thin, plain girl seated on a cushion near the hearth. Even sat inches away from the fire he could see that she was shivering, her eyes downcast and her knees gathered up to her chest.</p><p>               “What’s her name?” Zuko asked Jee. He didn’t miss the sharp glance of approval that the former sailor gave him. There had been a time when Zuko wouldn’t have asked. That he did now was why he could rely on Jee’s loyalty, so much stronger than the mealy, half-hearted stuff he had been obligated to offer when he had commanded Zuko’s ship only a couple years earlier. This difficult-to-please man – and others – <em>believed</em> in Zuko, now. Usually the thought made tentative pride and pleasure kindle in Zuko’s chest. Today it just made him tired.</p><p>               “Ai Lin, I believe.”</p><p>               Zuko nodded shortly and went to kneel in front of the girl. She glanced up at him, then wordlessly returned her gaze to the floor. Moments later she gasped in sudden recognition and nearly banged her head against his knees with her hasty bow.</p><p>               “Sit up,” Zuko said, with poorly contained impatience that he was immediately ashamed of. She straightened her back only reluctantly, a look of abject terror on her face. He made a concentrated effort to gentle his tone. “I have some questions for you.”</p><p>               “Yes,” Ai Lin said, pushing that one syllable out of her mouth with obvious effort. “I would—of course—your Fire Lord…ly…ness.” For a moment, mortification overcame the fear on her face.</p><p>               “I understand you found the Earth Kingdom’s representative in his room this morning.” He didn’t feel the need to say in what state the Earth Kingdom’s representative had been found. Zuko was pretty sure that wouldn’t do anything to calm her down.</p><p>               Her bottom lip began to quiver, and Zuko felt an answering quiver in his stomach. He’d never had much of a knack for comforting crying women. He’d had no exposure during childhood, because Azula had never been much inclined to tears. Ty Lee and Katara had both cried in front of him – with joy, with anger, with sadness – and the experience had invariably left him with the desire to retreat. He had tried to comfort Katara once. At the time, it had seemed like a good idea. It had taken him half an hour to melt the ice from his feet and hands, but by the time he was finished she had no longer been crying, so he figured his one attempt at comfort had been a success. Success or no, he had not been inclined to repeat the experience.</p><p>               “I just need to ask if you know anything. Anything out of the ordinary he might have said while you were cleaning his rooms, anyone coming or going who shouldn’t have been there, that kind of thing,” he said, desperately hoping to stave off any oncoming tears. The morning had been bad enough as it was.</p><p>               Mutely, she shook her head. The answer was about what he had expected. Whoever had done this had been long gone by the time she had arrived. He nodded in response and rose to leave.</p><p>               “He was always nice to me,” she offered shyly. Zuko paused and turned to look at her, surprised that she had volunteered even that much. She’d averted her gaze again, refusing to look him in the eyes. “He spoke to me like a friend whenever I came into his room to change the linens or collect his laundry. He said that he wasn’t used to people waiting on him. I’m sorry I don’t know more. I’m sorry I’m not—useful.”</p><p>               He wasn’t sure what he could say to that, but not to say anything would have been cruel. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”</p><p>               “Fire Lord?” Ai Lin swallowed hard, and he could see her gathering her courage. “I’m not going to be let go, am I?” She paused, then spoke all at once, the words rushing out of her. “It’s just, Lady Mai already told me that she no longer requires my services, and then General Iroh was kind enough to offer me a position, but I don’t think that I could find another one if I were to be dismissed here, so—.”</p><p>               Zuko waived a hand to stem the flood of words. “I have no intention of dismissing you. Just do your duty.” Her eyes were wide. The quiver was back in her lip. He had been too short with her. He left the room before he could do any further damage, waving off Jee’s offered escort and returning to his own wing of the palace and the comfort of his study.</p><p>               The task that awaited him, however, wasn’t a comfortable one.</p><p>               He took a scroll out of his drawer, unrolling it and weighing down the edges so that the heavy paper wouldn’t curl inwards. He stared at the blank page for a long moment before he took up a pen and began to write.</p><p>               He had no talent for letters. He wished that his uncle were here.</p><p>
  <em>               ...words cannot express the depth of my regret, or my shame. Rest assured that all of my resources are being put to finding whoever committed this horrible act and...</em>
</p><p>               Zuko sighed. He wondered if the business of ruling would ever get any easier.</p><p> </p><p>**</p><p> </p><p>               Lee whistled a cheerful little tune was he walked. He waited until he was well away from the room belonging to the murdered Earth Kingdom ambassador before he stopped. The smirk faded from his face. Death had long since ceased to bother him, but there really was very little to find funny about it.</p><p>               With a stifled sigh – he refused to let Mai’s influence rub off on him like that – he started down yet another one of the innumerable and largely identical palace hallways, then another, and another after that, until he found himself standing in front of the doors to the kitchens. He stepped inside. The noise and heat of the place didn’t bother him in the slightest. If there had been someone standing nearby to hear him, he might have claimed that the dry, hot air would give him a rash, but there wasn’t, so he didn’t.</p><p>               Near the door stood a guard, who watched the food’s preparation with the unblinking attention of a hawk. Only someone paying careful attention would have noticed the crudely tattooed flower on the back of her wrist, just peeking out from beneath the sleeve of her uniform, undoubtedly inked there by the careful but inexperienced hand of a fellow soldier. Only someone who knew what to look for would have, with considerable imagination, been able to identify the flower as a lotus.</p><p>               Iroh had pointed this woman out to Lee soon after his arrival in Capital City. Iroh had also been kind enough to point out several other people around the palace who he had thought Lee might be <em>particularly</em> interested in. One of them had been Tyro, the man sent here to represent the Earth Kingdom’s diplomatic interests in the Fire Nation.</p><p>               Lee sidled up to the guard and leaned casually against the wall beside her. For a while he just stood there, watching as the cooks and their helpers danced around each other, coordinated but too chaotic for Lee to fully understand what system they used to avoid running into each other or dropping hot pots and pans on the floor.</p><p>               “Tell the Grand Masters,” he said, “that the White Lotus has wilted.”</p><p>               The woman with the sharp eyes flinched, the only outward sign that she had heard or that the words meant anything to her. Lee nodded and left the kitchen.</p>
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<a name="section0011"><h2>11. Chapter 11</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>               They were two weeks on the road to Omashu when Ty Lee had her <em>brilliant idea</em>.</p><p>               While they traveled, the tents would be broken down and the wagons loaded early in the morning while rice boiled in large communal pots until it became thick porridge. Chipped wooden bowls would be passed around, and each morning Ty Lee would sprawl out on the ground next to Mai and smilingly add a heaping spoonful of sugar to Mai’s breakfast, claiming that Mai needed sweetening. Mai would have preferred the salt that most of the others used for seasoning, but the small ritual seemed to please Ty Lee, so she ate her sweetened porridge with minimal complaint. Ty Lee had a talent for striking when Mai, never inclined to keep early hours, was still bleary-eyed and heavy-limbed and stupid with sleep, so it wasn’t like Mai had many options other than to complain.</p><p>               The camp was never quiet, the air always filled with laughter or music, the roar of the tigers and the quiet day-to-day squabbles that were bound to arise when a group of people spent every waking minute together. It was also rarely clean; costumes would be strewn everywhere and only gathered together when they broke camp, and baths would be taken when people had both the time and the desire to brave whatever freezing cold body of water they had camped by. After a few days of living rough, Mai found herself feeling distinctly grimy.</p><p>               People drifted around camp haphazardly in the morning until, as if by accident, they were all loaded into their wagons and ready to leave. The routine was completely disorganized to Mai’s eyes yet seemed to have its own unique structure, facilitated by Huan’s occasional half-desperate, half-commanding pleas to <em>get a move on already, we’re wasting daylight, were you all raised by wild beasts—no, no, I didn’t mean you, Fong the Lion Tamer—hey, Ty Lee, have you seen my boots?</em></p><p>               They would travel through the days, hours spent in the wagons until Mai could feel the stutter of wheels across pitted dirt roads in her bones. At night they would set up camp, colorful tents springing up like flowers out of the ground, fires kindled and pots set out over those fires once again. People would rehearse or gamble or simply gossip until the food was ready, at which point they would gather around the fire, one big, happy, exceedingly strange family, too close and too warm for Mai to enjoy. They sat shoulder-to-shoulder, knees and thighs touching, comfortable with her because she was Ty Lee’s friend and therefore nearly one of them, where she could not be comfortable with them even if they <em>were</em> Ty Lee’s friends. Someone would invariably bring out a flask of cactus juice or a jar of pungent Earth Kingdom wine and pass it around with the food, and Mai would eat and drink and say almost nothing at all.</p><p>               Predictably, Iroh did not share her discomfort, and Mai had lost count of the number of times she had found him making friends with one of the animal tamer’s massive snakes, or playing pai sho with the withered old woman who told fortunes, or giving comfort and sage romantic advice to a sobbing contortionist.</p><p>               At night Mai would sleep in a tent too small for two with Ty Lee, letting Ty Lee’s drowsy, contended chatter lull her to sleep.</p><p>               When they finally reached a city or a town, the circus came alive. They would unpack the big tent from where it was kept packed away in one of the wagons and send it hurtling up, impossibly tall but always dwarfed by the walls of whatever town they were camped beside. Immediately they would attract a crowd; entertainment had been scarce in the months after the war, with so much of the Earth Kingdom decimated by the Fire Nation’s final conquests. It was bright and stuffy within the tent, and Mai would stand by the sidelines with Iroh and watch Ty Lee perform: the way she would hang suspended in the air for endless moments like some strange but graceful bird before plummeting toward the ground, the way the crowd gasped in reflexive fear and then let that gasped in breath out as relieved sighs or laughter when she landed safely in Huan’s arms or caught the edge of a platform dangling from above. Mai would listen to the laugher, see faces marred by years of stress and scarred by fire, and turn away, retreating to her tent as soon as Ty Lee’s act was over.</p><p>               The circus would stay a day or two before moving on, their stocks replenished and their pockets plump.</p><p>               Mai used the time on the road to get to know Huan—or he used it as an opportunity to get to know Mai, and she allowed him to make the attempt. She didn’t have much interest in the rest of Ty Lee’s companions, but she had promised that she would like Huan for Ty Lee’s sake, and it didn’t seem in the spirit of that promise to rebuff his advances even if the most assured way for her to like him would probably be not to speak to him at all.</p><p>               “Your juggler is a firebender,” she said at one point when he came to retrieve some odd or end that had been mixed in with Ty Lee’s things and not recovered after Ty Lee’s summary ejection of him from her tent in favor of Mai. Mai had yet to decide whether the easy way with which he had allowed himself to be supplanted was a point in his favor or not.</p><p>               He tensed, but after a moment he forced himself to relax and offered her one of his shy smiles. “We try not to advertise that.”</p><p>               “I imagine it wouldn’t make him very popular with the locals.”</p><p>               “No,” Huan agreed. He settled back on his heels, his search abandoned for the time being. “Someday it might be more trouble than I want, but I wasn’t going to tell Min that he needed to pack his bags the minute peace was declared. He’s been with the circus since he was born—his father was one of our performers, and he and I grew up together. He didn’t even know what a fire flake <em>was</em> until he was ten. Spent half a day vomiting the first time I convinced him to try them.”</p><p>               “You knew what they were?”</p><p>               “Ty Lee didn’t tell you? My father was Fire Nation. A lot of our performers are—or were. More than a few of the old guard packed up and left when I started us touring the Earth Kingdom. Before I took over, we stuck to the Fire Nation and the colonies. My father was—very loyal to his homeland. Loyal to the idea of it, at least, even if we spent more time on Earth Kingdom soil than we did in the Fire Nation by the time I was born.”</p><p>               “And your mother?”</p><p>               “Was his third wife, and remembered a time when her village hadn’t been under Fire Nation rule.” Huan seemed to realize how sharp his voice had gone only belatedly, and he offered her another one of his smiles in apology. “She loved him, I think.” He shrugged. “I hope she did. Ten years is a long time to share a home and a family and a bed with someone you don’t love. But she loved him by ignoring where he had come from. I know he loved her – he only sent me to Ba Sing Se University because it had always been a dream of hers – but I don’t think he ever really knew who she was. Not all of her. Not her anger.”</p><p>               “Is that what you’re doing with Ty Lee?” Mai’s voice was bland, because she had concerns about what it would be if she allowed it to be anything else. “Loving her by ignoring where she came from and who she is?”</p><p>               “Ty Lee isn’t my father. She doesn’t love places or ideas, she loves people,” Huan sounded very sure. “I know what she was. I know what she’s done.” That surprised Mai a little. She wouldn’t have expected Ty Lee to be quite so confessional with her new beau. “I know that she’s trying to make a life for herself that takes her as far away from all of that as possible, with a couple of exceptions—like you.” She was also surprised to hear that Huan did not sound altogether approving when he spoke of her friendship with Ty Lee, and perversely she found that she liked him better for it. All of that muscle might be concealing a spine after all.</p><p>               “Maybe she shouldn’t be here,” he continued. “Maybe Min should have left for the Fire Nation when the soldiers did—maybe <em>I </em>should have. In a few years, maybe I’ll decide that the best way to acknowledge what my father’s people did is to leave my mother’s home behind and start touring the Fire Nation again, rather than bringing what joy I can here, or maybe someone will decide it for me. I don’t have the answer to that. But I know that I like Ty Lee. I like the person she lets herself be when she’s not trying to please your former princess or do what she thinks she <em>should</em> do as a loyal citizen of the Fire Nation.” He closed Ty Lee’s trunk with a resounding <em>thunk</em>. “What about you, Lady Mai? Why do you do what you do? People, or places and ideas?”</p><p>               Mai tilted her head back to consider the roof of the tent. “Must I have <em>reasons</em> for how I live my life? Is it not enough to exist, and try very hard not to be bored to tears?”</p><p>               He snorted. “I’m trying to like you for Ty Lee’s sake,” he said, more earnestly than Mai would have managed had she been expressing similar sentiments, “but sometimes you make it very hard.”</p><p>               It was unexpected enough to startle a laugh out of Mai. She stopped immediately and felt a little bit alarmed by her own lack of restraint. In spite of his words, Huan made a point of sitting next to her at the campfire after that, and he spoke to her more easily, most of his early tongue-tied discomfort melted away. Mai thought that she might like him a little bit after all. At the very least, she spent more time watching him with Ty Lee, and knew that she liked the way that he didn’t try to dim Ty Lee’s bubbling enthusiasm and restless, relentless energy, just provided a warm and steady place for her to land when the day was done.</p><p>               Mai did not like the life of a circus performer. There was dirt caked beneath her nails and nothing but canvas between her and the nighttime insects and too many people who seemed to feel that they were now close enough companions to <em>touch</em> her. She didn’t like it, but sometimes she thought that she might understand why Ty Lee loved it.</p><p>               They were a day outside Gaoling when Ty Lee had her <em>brilliant idea</em>. She called it that, and said it in such a way that Mai could <em>hear</em> the emphasis.</p><p>               “No,” Mai said.</p><p>               She repeated the word every time Ty Lee mentioned the <em>brilliant idea</em> for the rest of the day. She provided reasons why the <em>brilliant idea</em> was not really quite so brilliant after all. They were very good reasons, so she was a little baffled when she somehow ended up dressed in a leather at the center of the circus tent, knives in hand, before the attentively watching crowds of Gaoling.</p><p>               She thought that the leather at least was entirely unnecessary, and had protested fervently when Ty Lee showed her the so-called costume. “You need a gimmick,” Ty Lee had said, unmoved and cheerfully unmovable, “and the audience <em>loves</em> me. Therefore, you need to be threatening. And leather is threatening!”</p><p>               There was a notorious man of wealth and leisure in the Fire Nation who liked his women threatening and dressed in black leather. Maybe there were people in the Earth Kingdom who felt the same, but Mai wasn’t particularly interested in finding out.</p><p>               Her mouth was tight as she walked out into the ring with Ty Lee. She barely heard Huan’s introduction, his voice carrying easily across the space and glowing with showmanship that she hadn’t expected from him when they had first set out. “Do not change the routine from what we’ve practiced,” she told Ty Lee. “No improvising. If you change the routine, I will hurt you.”</p><p>               Ty Lee shot her a wounded look. “It’s not nice to threaten your friends, Mai.”</p><p>               “It’s not a threat,” Mai said, words pitched soft and edged with the barest hint of exasperation. Her neck felt uncomfortably tight, and the rocky stretch of ground where Ty Lee had pitched their tent was only partially to blame. “You <em>know</em> what my knives can do. You saw what they did to Azula. I didn’t love maiming a friend so much that I want to repeat the experience.”</p><p>               Mai froze, and saw Ty Lee go equally still beside her. She didn’t know why she had said it, when she and Ty Lee had so successfully danced around the subject for weeks now and when they both had other things that they needed to focus on.</p><p>               Ty Lee looked wide-eyed at her, for once stunned into silence. Mai stared back, her own eyes narrowed; perhaps if she pretended that she had said nothing exceptional then Ty Lee would be forced to allow the moment to pass without remark. She didn’t hold out much hope. She grunted when, overcome and uncaring of the onlookers, Ty Lee threw her arms around Mai, ignoring the way that Mai immediately stiffened up and tried to squirm away. “I would have chosen you,” she murmured, low and secret in Mai’s ear. “If I had needed to choose, I would have chosen you. Not Azula.”</p><p>               Mai stopped struggling. She knew what Azula had meant to Ty Lee, so it was—not a lie, because this wasn’t something Ty Lee would lie about, but perhaps the truth rewritten into something kinder because Mai was the only one left for her <em>to</em> choose. Mai didn’t doubt Ty Lee’s affection at least, so she sighed and forced herself to lean into the hug, willing to tolerate having the life squeezed out of her as fair trade for—for knowing that Ty Lee meant the words <em>now</em>, even if they’d never have to test them, even if they wouldn’t have been true <em>then</em>. “What about my gimmick? No one’s going to think I’m very threatening if you’re clinging to me.”</p><p>               Ty Lee finally released her. She was grinning. “Oh well. We’ll do better next time.” She kissed Mai on the cheek, leaving a pink-tinted smudge, and flounced away before Mai could protest that there wasn’t going to <em>be</em> a next time.</p><p>               Mai followed after her more slowly. Ty Lee was all fluttering silk and big, sweeping movements meant to catch the attention of a fickle crowd. Mai had little ability and even less desire to pander to an audience, so she was surprised when she swept a glance over the stands and found most of those watching eyes firmly fixed on <em>her</em>. Earlier they had been swept up in Ty Lee’s bright, boisterous energy as they watched her perform her acrobatic tricks, but now a tangible pall filled the stuffy air of the tent, as if it was <em>Mai’s</em> mood that was catching. Silence was impossible, but enthusiastic chatter and laughter were slowly replaced by quiet murmurs and the even quieter hiss of speculative whispering.</p><p>               The shake of the wrist that released four of Mai’s knives into her waiting hands hadn’t pleased Ty Lee. She pouted over the Mai’s lack of <em>flare</em> the whole time they had practiced, but Mae had stolidly refused to embellish. Her spine prickled with sweat. It wasn’t nerves. Mai didn’t sweat under pressure. Even she wasn’t impervious to the heat of the tent, however. She wondered how many other performers had dripped moisture into the leather of this costume and repressed a shudder of disgust. At least the thin gloves were her own, the stitches and leather much finer than anything that the circus could provide. She wouldn’t have to boil her knives when this was done. She already wasn’t looking forward to the things she would have to do to make her skin feel clean again.</p><p>               Ty Lee was already in place, her back against a hastily constructed target made of spare wooden boards and the extra rope that always seemed to be lurking in every unattended corner of the camp, waiting to trip up unsuspecting bystanders. This close Mai could see the evidence of how quickly the circus carpenter had needed to work to accommodate Ty Lee’s <em>brilliant idea</em>, but it had been painted white and eye-scorching green and probably looked well enough to the audience. Huan crossed the ring and began to secure Ty Lee’s hands to the edge of the target. Mai knew from observation and experience that he wasn’t the tying the ropes <em>nearly</em> tight enough to keep Ty Lee from escaping, but that wasn’t really the point and, like the target, it would look good from a distance. Ty Lee’s lips were moving, and Mai couldn’t hear the words but from the way that Huan’s cheeks lit up with a now-familiar blush, she could guess. She rolled her eyes and allowed her attention to wander while she waited for them to finish.</p><p>               Iroh was standing in his customary place near the edge of the ring. Mai reminded herself that envy was an ugly emotion. He smiled at her widely enough that she could count his teeth even at this distance and offered her an encouraging thumbs up. Mai ignored him.</p><p>               Huan stepped away from Ty Lee, and the last of the crowd’s noise died off, outside of the occasional cough and the discontented grumbling of a child kept up late and grown bored with the spectacle. Mai tuned out even that distraction, until all she could hear was the steady rhythm of her own breath. Her hand flicked out and the first of the knives left her hand.</p><p>               It sank into the wood next to Ty Lee’s hip, close enough that Mai knew she’d be hearing about it the next day if she’d frayed the fabric of Ty Lee’s pants. She frowned a little. Unacceptable imprecision; clearly practice hadn’t done nearly as much to keep her skills sharp as chasing Azula while she chased the Avatar around the world.</p><p>               Hip, shoulder, shoulder. The next three knives landed better, close enough that there was no gap between Ty Lee’s body and the steel, but not so close that Huan would be doing any additional mending—no amount of determination on Ty Lee’s part to live the life of a simple circus performer could undo a childhood where she’d never been expected to lift a needle and thread. Mai’s embroidery had always been above reproach. She’d ended up patching Ty Lee and Azula’s clothing more than once when Azula’s desire for stealth and speed kept them out of the reach of servants to pass the work off to. She’d closed a hole on Ty Lee’s sleeve with tiny pink apple blossoms rather than a plain stitch, because she’d known that Ty Lee would be delighted by the discovery.</p><p>               The crowd was applauding. Mai barely heard it. There were eighteen thin stilettos strapped to Mai’s wrists. Under normal circumstances she kept a matching set strapped to her ankles, but the costume wouldn’t accommodate them and she refused to prolong this more than she had to in order to placate Ty Lee’s whimsy.</p><p>               The stilettos hit the target, one after another. When the last sank into the wood, Mai stood back, considering her handiwork. There would be a perfect impression of Ty Lee’s body punctured into the wood. Mai was not looking forward to wrestling her knives free of the target, but she also wasn’t about to leave the task to some meat-fisted peasant whose only experience with a weapon was polishing the dulled prop sword that he swallowed for the entertainment of the masses. The urge to leave now that her task was complete was strong, but she waited placidly for Ty Lee to be untied and join her for a bow. Were she of a more fanciful nature, she might have imagined that she could hear her mother disowning her from beyond the grave. The thought filled her with a strange satisfaction.</p><p>               Ty Lee failed to entice her into an encore performance the next night, or any of the nights after that. Mai had reached the limits of what she would do to please Ty Lee, although she thought that those limits might be further out then she set them for nearly anyone else. She had thought, standing in front of that audience beneath the prickling heat of the circus lights, Ty Lee’s arms around her, that she was the only one left standing for Ty Lee to choose, but she supposed that was true for her as well—Ty Lee was the only other person in the world who really understood what it was to choose the losing side of a war with no greater incentive than a princess’ beckoning finger, the only one who knew the particular delight and terror of being called Azula’s friend.</p><p>               They were only a day outside of Omashu when the messenger hawk arrived. The thin leather canister strapped to its back was stamped with Mai’s own family seal, and she barely had time to unhook it from the hawk’s harness before one of the animal tamers was spiriting the creature away, the light of new love in his eyes. Mai watched them go with ill-favor and hoped that she’d have no need to send a return letter, since she had little doubt that by the time the hawk was returned to her it would be either fed to the point of being unable to fly or cosseted to the point of deciding to join the circus and ne’er return to her family’s mews.</p><p>               <em>Lady Mai. Yesterday I went to visit General Heng’s widow.</em></p><p>               The writing was barely legible. It was her own fault for leaving the Fire Nation so quickly that she was now forced to rely on Lee to gather intelligence about her exiled soldier. She didn’t doubt his ability, just her own willingness to decipher whatever he had to tell her.</p><p>               <em>The lady was understandably reluctant to let a disreputable, if exceedingly handsome, specimen such as myself through the front door. Luckily your name was enough for her to grant me entry, even if she made me come in through the kitchens. You’re so fortunate to have such a charming servant, because it didn’t take long before we were laughing it up in her parlor, talking like two old friends over tea</em>.</p><p>               She also had some doubts about the accuracy of Lee’s version of events.</p><p>               <em>It was easy to turn the conversation to her children; she’s prouder than is probably politic right now of her two strapping sons and their various military accomplishments. When I reminded her that she did, in fact, have three strapping sons, relations between us chilled significantly. I was brokenhearted but, for your sake, I bravely continued to pester the lady until she had me removed. She and her youngest apparently fell out of touch following the death of his father. They were in regular contact before that, however, and she had his address in Omashu, which she parted with in a bid to get me to leave without further disruption. She also had the picture that I’ve included with this letter, which I liberated as her attendants escorted me off the premises. Shun is the one on the left</em>.</p><p>               It seemed that Mai would have some ruffled feathers to smooth once she returned home. Or not. No one left to please, and no one’s career to advance. What did it matter if a general’s widow thought that Lady Mai had sent a servant to harass her? She fished into the canister until she found the second sheet of paper that she had overlooked, smaller than the scroll with Lee’s letter but better quality, the page thick and smooth between her fingers. A round-faced woman and man with gray in his hair but a body still kept in fighting trim sat at the forefront of the picture. Standing behind the couple were three men about her age, although they all must be older by now. She recognized on their faces the rigid inattention of someone forced to pose for the portrait artist’s brush, and felt her own spine stiffen in sympathetic discomfort.</p><p>               The two older boys had the look of their father, wide through the jaw and thick through the shoulders and arms. Shun was smaller and leaner, with a great deal of his mother about his eyes and the curve of his chin. Mai thought there might be something familiar about his handsome, thin-lipped face, but if she’d seen him before it had been as a child, and Mai barely bothered to remember people she had met in the last week unless she had reason to.</p><p>               An address and a face. Lee really had outdone himself.</p><p>               She skimmed the last few lines of the letter with disinterest that quickly became trepidation as she read. <em>There is absolutely nothing else of note to report. Life at the palace has been so excessively dull that I fear you would expire immediately were you to hurry to resolve your business in the Earth Kingdom and return at your earliest possible convenience. I have certainly not been told by any venerable authority figure within our grand Nation that I should keep my big mouth shut when corresponding with you and, by extension, General Iroh.</em></p><p>               Right. And there had never been a war in Ba Sing Se.</p><p>               Unsubtle, even for Lee. He was fortunate that Zuko wasn’t actually the kind of ruler who would intercept his subjects’ correspondence to make sure that his orders were being followed. Lee hadn’t signed his name, but there was a drawing beneath the final line that might, if she squinted, resemble a flower. Maybe not; she was dubious enough of her interpretation and Lee’s artistic skill to ask Iroh when she showed him the letter later that day.</p><p>                “A lotus, unless I’m mistaken,” he said. He chuckled, but she couldn’t help but feel that it sounded forced. “One in dire need of some water, I think. Your friend might have a sharp eye, but I’m afraid his talent as an artist leaves something to be desired.”</p><p>               Mai studied him. “And the rest of it? Obviously something has gone wrong. Aren’t you worried?”</p><p>               “No,” Iroh said decisively. “I trust my nephew’s judgment. If he hasn’t written to me himself, it’s because he doesn’t need my help.” The words sounded true when he said them, but there was something shadowed about his eyes. A moment later the shadow was gone and he was smiling at her. “I suspect Master Lee is just feeling a little overwhelmed right now and wishing for my—<em>our</em> hasty return.”</p><p>               “How can he feel overwhelmed? He never <em>does</em> anything.”</p><p>               Iroh was quick to turn his laugh into a cough. “Bored, then? Or lonely?”</p><p>               Yes, that sounded more like Lee.</p><p>               “I guess we’ll find out when we make it back,” Mai said with a sigh. “For now, better to focus on finding the princess.” It seemed unlikely that she would find Princess Ursa lurking at the back of some Earth Kingdom hovel with the man Mai suspected had been charged with escorting her away from the Fire Nation, so oblivious to the changing world that she hadn’t immediately returned to reclaim her royal birthright—and to reunite with what was left of her family, that would probably be important to her too, although Mai could barely fathom it. Mai didn’t know whether she hoped that it would be so easy or dreaded the possibility. She didn’t exactly want to spend months chasing leads around the Earth Kingdom, but the search being over and done with so soon would ruin what little entertainment it provided and leave her once again at loose ends.</p><p>               The next morning, standing beside Iroh at the end of one of the long bridges that led to the gates of Omashu, Mai was forced to reassess. She wasn’t sure why she’d ever found this hunt entertaining. Her breakfast sat cold and heavy in her stomach. “Let’s get this over with.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Work has been busy so I might have to shift to a biweekly schedule for a while. I keep meaning to mention that I'm on <a href="https://things-with-teeth.tumblr.com/">Tumblr</a>, come talk to me about all the flying bison I haven't been able to shoehorn into this fic.</p>
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